S&P gives 'BB' rating for ICICI's hybrid Tier-1 securities
Singapore: Standard & Poor's Ratings Services has assigned its 'BB-' rating to the hybrid Tier-1 securities to be issued by India's largest private sector bank- ICICI Bank.
The differential between the issue rating and the counterparty credit rating on ICICI Bank reflects the subordinated nature of the notes and embedded interest deferral feature, S&P said in a statement.
The proposed hybrid Tier-1 notes are perpetual non cumulative subordinated debt securities.

These notes will have a call option of 10 years from the date of issue.
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Exim Bank plans SME finance model
Kolkata: The Export-Import Bank of India (Exim Bank) is working on a special model to finance small and medium enterprises (SME) in India for tapping the export market in Africa and other continents.

Exim Bank has joined hands with Geneva-based International Trade Co-operation (ITC) for the model. There would be some eligibility criteria for the SME and SSIs and the bank is working on those.

The bank is planning to create a corpus of Rs50-60 crore for the fund and is hoping to start the project from October this year. Exim Bank had already received 50 applications for the fund and has shortlisted 50-60 companies.
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Big provident funds can invest in PSU oil bonds
New Delhi: The government said it will allow provident funds (PFs) with a corpus of over Rs1,80,000 crore to buy oil bonds being issued to PSU oil companies as a compensation for selling petro-products at lower prices. The government will issue bonds worth Rs24,000 crore to PSU oil companies for the fiscal '06-07. By letting PFs buy these bonds, the government is also ensuring no undue pressure is put on liquidity in the banking system.

There are indications that the bonds will be statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) eligible and would be tradable. Put simply, investments in these bonds will count towards the SLR of banks. This enables banks to buy these bonds at a later stage when they have adequate liquidity.

The oil bonds to be issued to the oil companies will total Rs24,000 crore, if crude oil prices continue to remain at current price levels. This is over and above the subsidy bailout package by ONGC, which is given through discounts on crude oil prices. Oil marketing companies which have been incurring huge losses on the sales of all fuels — petrol, diesel, LPG and kerosene — will need these bonds to become profitable again.
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