The Mega Oil Psus Merger - An Investors' Perspective

Joydeep R Ray speaks to the key faces involved with the proposed merger of the oil PSUs and brings this report on the progress of creating India's largest corporate entity while Lohit Bharambe does the number crunching for the investors

- Joydeep R Ray

When Arun Jaitley, the country's Finance Minister and one of the trusted lieutenants of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, uttered these words during his budget speech this February, speculations kicked off across various quarters of the industries, pressure groups, lobbying entities, employees' associations, as also among experts and analysts. Even before Jaitley or his colleague in the cabinet, Dharmendra Pradhan, country's Petroleum & Natural Gas Minister, could further clarify on the not-so-exclusive idea of merging oil PSUs, stocks of various oil PSUs listed on the bourses started moving, some upwards and some others downwards. Broking firms started coming up with their 'well-researched' thick reports on oil PSUs' merger and its probable impact on the stocks of government-run entities like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL), Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) as most of them started believing that a merger of ONGC with either HPCL or BPCL was going to happen very soon.