Media barons to visit India
New Delhi: A host of media czars are visiting India next week. They include head honchos of two of the leading media conglomerates in the world - AOL Time Warner and News Corp.

Gerald Levin, chief executive officer, AOL Time Warner, would be leading a high profile delegation into the country early next week. Close on the heels would be News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, along with his son, James.

These visits would coincide with the annual media and entertainment conference, Frames2002, organised by Ficci, that would see professionals from various walks of the industry descend on Mumbai on 15- 16 March.

Apart from James Murdoch, who delivers the keynote speech at the conference, other honchos slated to be present there include Patrick Cross, managing director, BBC Worldwide, Yoshinori Imai, director general, NHK, Japan and senior executives from Motion Pictures Association of America and representatives from Europe and Hong Kong media industry.
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Govt gives Rs 300 cr for US-64 deficit
Mumbai: The government has sanctioned Rs 300 crore for the current fiscal towards deficit financing the Unit Trust of Indias US-64 scheme. This has been provided for in the finance bill as revenue expenditure to be incurred by the government for the current year.

This fresh financial package is to deficit finance the shortfall UTI is facing under the administered pricing mechanism which has been implemented since 1 January.

As per the new pricing mechanism, a special repurchase price has been announced whereby the difference between the special repurchase price and the actual net asset value of the scheme will be financed by the central exchequer.
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HFCL moved funds to KP-linked cos
Mumbai: The Joint Parliamentary Committee investigating the stockmarket scam has found that around Rs 200 crore sanctioned by ICICI to Himachal Futuristic Communications was diverted to various entities linked to Ketan Parekh.

ICICI had sanctioned a corporate loan of Rs 200 crore to HFCL to meet working capital requirements. According to ICICI, the company had sought assistance to execute the large orders on hand.

However, a scrutiny by the RBI revealed that of the sanctioned Rs 200 crore, Rs 150 crore was transferred to the accounts of Digital Superhighway and Rs 10 crore to Burlington Finance, which operated an account with the GTB Nariman Point branch in Mumbai.

DSPL is a Zee group company, while BFC was HFCLs own subsidiary. The regulator found that on the same day the GTB branch transferred Rs 150 crore from DSPL account to Panther Fincap & Management Services Ltd, a company belonging to Ketan Parekh.

Three days later, BFC too followed suit and transferred Rs 10 crore to Classic Credit Ltd, another company having links with Parekh.
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RIL, RPL merger to benefit MFs
Mumbai: Mutual funds are expected to gain substantially from the merger of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and Reliance Petroleum Ltd (RPL).The mutual funds that will benefit the most include Prudential ICICI, HDFC Mutual, Cholamandalam Mutual andthe Unit Trust of India.

Most of the mutual funds have RPL in their portfolio of debt schemes. These debt instruments were issued AA rating by Crisil, which has been put under rating watch for upward review following the merger. This means, these debt instruments will be upgraded to AAA rating from the present rating once the company completes the merger formalities. Thus, these bond funds holding large positions in this paper will become safer and accordingly the prices will also go up since the premium quoted in the secondary market will be on the higher side.
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One million mobiles in Delhi
New Delhi: Delhi will become the first city in the country to have one million cell phone users in the next couple of days.

Industry experts say the next million would be added in about 18 months. In contrast, it has taken several decades for basic phones to reach about 2.3 million lines.

There are six million cellular phone users in the country.

Bharti has about 5,50,000 subscribers in Delhi (a little under half its nationwide subscriber base), Hutchison-Essar has 3,75,000 while MTNL, which launched mobile services last year, has about 70,000.
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