Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Oil trouble continues --- Indian Oil has no money to buy crude

State-Run Oil Co Needs $3Bn Every Month

IOC has no money,
bonds to buy crude


Sanjay Dutta TNN 26th July 2008

New Delhi: Oil’s relentless rally till the last fortnight combined with government lethargy in issuing bonds to make up losses on fuel sales have put Indian Oil Corporation in a spot. The flagship refiner-marketer has run out of money as well as the Centre’s IOUs—which the company has been encashing for foreign exchange—to buy crude.
Indian Oil needs roughly Rs 12,000 crore ($3 billion) every month to buy crude but loses Rs 413 crore daily on fuel sales. As a result, the company has been borrowing heavily from banks and incurring further expense on interest. Lately, it has also been encashing the bonds under an RBI mechanism. In June, IndianOil used up the last of the bonds it had to raise about Rs 9,900 crore through the RBI mechanism. It is now left with bonds worth about Rs 4,300 crore that had already been securitised for raising funds from the overnight call market.

Indeed, IndianOil—as also HPCL and BPCL—has been running on borrowed money. “Our borrowing had reached Rs 42,000 crore in May. In June, it came down to Rs 35,000 crore but if another tranche of bonds does not come through quickly, the borrowings will rise again,’’ a top IndianOil executive said. The company board sometime back had cleared an enabling provision to raise the borrowing limit to Rs 80,000 crore.

The oil ministry has asked the finance ministry for over Rs 50,600 crore bonds to partially make up the losses during the first half of 2008 calendar. The ministry has sought Rs 14,956.17 crore bonds for the last quarter of 2007-08 and Rs 35,672.70 crore more for the first quarter of 2008-09. The total loss on fuels in 2007-08 has been put at Rs 70,579 crore.

Ironically, the situation has been created by none other than the government itself. The government refused to raise pump prices or reduce taxes periodically and let the losses pile up as oil kept climbing. Till last fortnight, the oilmarketers were losing Rs 16.70 on each litre of petrol, Rs 27.61 on diesel, Rs 38.09 on kerosene and Rs 338.53 on each cylinder of cooking gas. This is after the government raised pump prices on June 4 by Rs 5 a litre for petrol and Rs 2 a litre of diesel and Rs 20 per cooking gas cylinder. The government is expected to review the prices in October, but another round of price increase looks unlikely in an election year. If pump prices do not go up and crude remains in the $130 a barrel range, IndianOil reckons it will close the year with a Rs 121,015 crore loss.

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