SAIL may bid for foreign firms: Paswan

PATNA: The Centre is mulling a proposal to relax the existing rules to help facilitate public sector giant Steel Authority Of India Limited (SAIL) to join the race for takeover of foreign steel companies like Mittals and Tatas, according to Steel minister Ramvilas Paswan.

"The existing rules put certain limitations on SAIL when it comes to buying foreign companies. But we will be amending and relaxing the rules to enable the public sector giant make offshore bids," Paswan said while speaking on the occasion of the district dealers' conference here last evening.

Observing that SAIL had already started buying sick public sector units like IISCO, BRL, Neelanchal Inspat Limited and MER, he said buoyed by the profit of Rs 14,000 crore earned by the largest steel manufacturing company, the Centre was planning to invest rupees one lakh crore by 2020 for its expansion.

Ruling out any proposal to sell the company to Arcellor-Mittal, Paswan said "SAIL is doing exceedingly fine."

He said his ministry had taken a policy decision for uniform pricing of all steel products of SAIL across the country.

Paswan informed that SAIL would adopt ten steel villages in the country under social development programme.