Indian Express
ESSAR GLOBAL Fund Ltd, the holding company of Essar Group of companies, has repaid the last tranche of debt of Rs 12,000 crore ($1.75 billion) to its various Indian and foreign lenders. This is in addition to the Rs 30,000 crore ($5 billion) repayment made in August 2017 to various lenders from the proceeds of the Essar Oil monetisation.
“The only continuing lender to Essar Global is now VTB, which has been working with Essar Global over the past three years to monetise certain assets, strategically lighten the balance sheet, deleverage the group and reposition it for growth in the future,” it said in a statement.
Essar Global has now repaid around Rs 6,300 crore to ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Standard Chartered Bank. With this, these banks have been repaid their entire facility of Rs 31,500 crore, which they had provided to Essar Global to fund its capital expenditure programme in 2008-14.
In addition to repaying all of its existing secured debt, Essar Global has also simultaneously concluded a settlement with all lenders who had provided debt facilities to erstwhile Essar Steel Minnesota Ltd and were beneficiaries of unsecured guarantees from Essar Global.
Lenders with whom settlements have been concluded include various Indian banks led by ICICI Bank, State Bank of India as well as a consortium of international funds led by Davidson Kempner.
As part of the settlement, Essar Global has purchased $260 million face value notes issued by Mesabi Metallics Inc. These notes substantially constitute all of the debt of Mesabi, and paves the way for Essar Global to once again participate in the low-cost iron ore mining and pellet manufacturing project that is under construction in Minnesota, USA.
Over the past two years, the Essar group has repaid more than Rs 1,37,000 crore ($21 billion) of debt, including Essar Steel, majority of which is to the Indian banking system. This is more than 80 per cent of its group debt.
In 2017, through the sale of Essar Oil Ltd to a consortium led by Rosneft and Trafigura, Essar Global had repaid approximately Rs 86,000 crore of group liabilities, including Rs 72,600 crore to banks. Additional asset sales that have been concluded during the past two years include the sale of Aegis to Telepeiformance and CSP for Rs 6,000 crore ($910 million), and the sale of Equinox Business Parks to Brookfield Asset Management for Rs 2,400 crore ($360 million)
https://www.essar.com/media-reports/
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