Max working on new plan for merger with HDFC Life

Max India, which has been seeking to merge its insurance business with HDFC Life since last year, is still hopeful of creating a new workable structure in the next 12 days after the insurer majorityowned by the country’s leading mortgage-financier announced its plan to sell shares in an initial public offering ( IPO).

"We are working out a new structure and I am hopeful and optimistic that the merger will go through," said Mohit Talwar, managing director at Max Financial Services. "We are in a standstill agreement until tthe end of the month."

While announcing the IPO plans Monday, HDFC had said that no structure prior to the IPO of HDFC Life has been identified which satisfied, or will rather satisfy, the shareholder requirement. ET had reported earlier that the share sale, the third by an insurer, would value the country’s third-largest private insurer at about Rs 50,000 crore.

HDFC Life and Max Life had proposed a four-leg merger last August where in the first leg, Max Financial Services, a holding company, was to be merged with Max Life. That was to be followed by a demerger of the life insurance business, which would subsequently be merged with HDFC Life.

Max and HDFC had already extended the deadlines twice. It was earlier extended to June and then to July 2017. ET was the first to report, in its edition dated July 14, that HDFC plans to call off its merger and push ahead with its IPO plans.

For his part, Talwar described HDFC Life’s announced plans as "an enabling resolution to do an IPO, and it is no different from what they have said while going to the press a few weeks ago."

India’s insurance regulator has objected to the merger that entailed Max Life’s amalgamation with the listed Max Financial Services, and subsequently with HDFC Life. The regulator had raised concerns over the merger citing Section 35 of the Insurance Act, which does not allow insurers to merge with a non-banking finance company.