Government to meet on Wednesday on proposed sovereign wealth fund
07 May 2012
The govt will meet on Wednesday to decide on the proposed sovereign wealth fund that could be used to buy overseas assets for the benefit of the state-owned companies (See: Govt plans to further back Coal India spending).
A meeting of secretaries of 10 government departments will decide on the nature of the fund, which would be vetted by the union cabinet. The government will have to take a call on whether the fund would be managed by the selected public sector mutual funds or the Centre
Secretaries in the ministries of finance, public enterprises, petroleum and natural gas, and power would be attending the meeting, which will be headed by Cabinet Secretary.
Besides other things, the meeting will decide on the management of the corpus of the fund.
It is being suggested that the disinvestment corpus will be used for investing in energy and raw material needs, recapitalisation of PSUs and the National Investment Fund. (NIF).
The department of disinvestment has proposed that the disinvestment proceeds be split into the three categories equally. Currently proceeds from disinvestment of central public sector enterprises are channelised into the NIF, which is maintained outside the Consolidated Fund of India.