[1]Mumbai: The Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) on Wednesday dismissed an appeal filed by Gillette India against a SEBI decision rejecting the company’s three-stage plan to reduce the promoter stake in the company to 75 per cent.
The multinational giant was also pulled up by the tribunal for not adopting a ‘simple and straight forward’ approach to comply with the minimum public shareholding requirement.
“We fail to understand as to why (Gillette India) does not comply with the requirement of 25 per cent of public shareholding by adopting a simple and straight forward approach and offering the shortfall in 25 per cent public shareholding to the public through one of the methods elucidated by Sebi instead of adopting a contentious and circuitous method which is against the spirit of law, as one proposed by them presently,” stated the SAT order. At present, the promoters hold 88.76 per cent stake in the company with the Indian promoter (Poddar group) holding 12.9 per cent while its foreign partner, the P&G group holds 75.9 per cent stake.
According to the proposed plan, the Poddar group would first transfer four per cent of its shares to the P&G group following which the former’s stake would come down to 8.9 per cent.
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