Tata Power Company Ltd has signed a revised pact to sell its stake in an Indonesian mine and related trading and infrastructure companies at a price nearly a fifth lower than the original deal.
The company has now agreed to sell its 30% stake in PT Arutmin for $246.64 million compared with $390 million earlier, it said in a stock-exchange filing.
The deal value of infrastructure companies has been revised to $154.28 million from $120 million, it said.
This means Tata Power will now get a total of $400.92 million instead of $510 million earlier, a 21% drop.
Tata Power said the deal value was revised after adjusting certain prior period liabilities. These include settlement of past claims with a mining contractor after a court order in which the company’s share is about $80 million and other statutory liabilities worth about $50 million.
The Indian company had first agreed to sell the stake in PT Arutmin and its associated companies to Indonesia’s Bakrie group in early 2014.
The deal marked Tata Power’s exit from one of two coal assets in Indonesia that it had acquired from the Bakrie group in 2007 for $1.1 billion.
Tata Power continues to own a 30% stake in the other asset, PT Kaltim Prima Coal, which owns one of the largest thermal coal producing mines in the world.
The power company is one of several Tata Group companies that have been selling overseas assets as part of efforts to reduce debt that had ballooned when they expanded their international operations through multiple acquisitions in diverse sectors in the first decade of this century.
Tata Steel Ltd, Tata Communications and Indian Hotels Co. Ltd are among the other group companies selling overseas assets from the UK to the US.
The group is in the middle of a turmoil after Tata Sons Ltd, the holding company, sacked Cyrus Mistry as the chairman in October and named his predecessor Ratan Tata as interim chief.
Mistry had termed his sacking illegal and warned the group faced massive write-downs because of five “legacy hotspot†loss-making businesses that he had inherited. These five included Tata Power.
Tata Sons is also trying to remove Mistry from individual group companies; software services firm Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Tata Global Beverages Ltd have already ousted Mistry from the chairman’s post. Mistry remains the chairman of several group firms including Tata Power, which has called a meeting of shareholders on 26 December to remove him.
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