New Delhi: IFCI has declared that it will start inviting financial bids within a week’s time and hoped to finish the process of 26 per cent stake sale within this year, subject to regulatory and other authorizations.

While addressing the newspersons after the board meeting, the IFCI CEO and Managing Director, Atul Kumar Rai, said, “We will float request for proposal (RFP) within a week and expect to receive financial bids in two months. We expect to finalise [the] strategic investor in two-and-a-half months from outside.”

Mr. Rai said that the country’s oldest financial institution had also offered options to 30 banking and financial institutions to transform less than 50 per cent of their Rs. 1,479-crore zero coupon debenture bonds into equity shares. The remaining debt would yield interest rate of 10-year government securities. These debentures, convertible only in 2021-22, do not generate any coupon rate at the moment.

Mr. Rai said that the equity alternative offered to the banks and financial institutions would not slow down the stake sale process as the applicants had already been told that they would receive 26 per cent equity, post-dilution.

IFCI had rated eight entities out of the 10 which had applied for ‘expression of interest’ (EoI). New Bridge Capital of the U.S. and Kotak Mahindra Bank copped out of race. The entities that are still in the fray include GE Corporation, IDFC, Cargill Financial Services Corporation, Natixis and the Blackstone Group, Sterlite Industries (India), Morgan Stanley and Co., WL Ross and Co LLC, GS Capital Partners (VI) Fund, Standard Chartered Bank and HDFC, Shinsei Bank Ltd., PNB and JC Flower and CO LLC.

In the meantime, the corporation has registered a four-fold increase in net profit to Rs. 497.29 crore for the quarter ended September 30, 2007. The total income arose 81 per cent to Rs. 595.60 crore from Rs. 327.4 crore in the year-ago period.

For the first six months, the corporation saw a surge in net profit to Rs. 744.15 crore from Rs. 100.22 crore in the same period of the last financial (2006).