JSW Techno Projects Management Ltd, a promoter company of Sajjan Jindal’s JSW, is acquiring 49% shares Brahmani River Pellets (BRPL) in Odisha. The company informed the BSE on Friday that it said it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire these shares from the Aryan mining and Trading Corp.
A JSW spokesperson clarified that “JSW Techno Projects Management is a promoter company and the acquisition is not being done by JSW Steel.”
BRPL is fully owned subsidiary of AMTC whose majority shares (73%) were held by former British commodity trader Stemcor Group. The Kolkata based Sanjay Saraf family holds the remaining 27% stake and is engaged in a bitter dispute over what to do with BRPL and its debt with Moorgate Industries Ltd, formed after the demerger and restructuring of debt-laden Stemcor in 2015.
In Odisha, BRPL has a pellet plant of 4 million tonne annual capacity and a 4.7mt beneficiation plant connected by a 220-km slurry pipeline.
Last month this prompted Tata Steel to walk away from an acquisition of BRPL it had agreed to in December of 2016 for an “enterprise value of Rs 900 crore. The plant’s location – literally across the road from Tata Steel’s 3mtpa Kalinganagar factory in Jajpur district – couldn’t have been more synergistic for the company.
In a filing to the BSE the company blamed it on the sellers’ failure in “obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals from the Reserve Bank of India, settlement of proceedings under FEMA by the Directorate of Enforcement, approval from the Income Tax authorities, etc,” Tata Steel’s decision came after the court stayed the deal.
His company, JSW Steel, has said it wants to set up a 12million tonne capacity steel plant in the state, proposed at the site of the shelved Posco project in Odisha. The Rs 55,000 crore plans submitted to the Odisha government include a 900-megawatt captive power plant, a pellet unit, captive port and slurry pipeline from Odisha’s iron ore districts to the coast.
