Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas appointed 3 Independent Directors on ONGC Board

The Union Government on 21 June 2011 announced the appointment of three independent directors, including former RBI Deputy Governor Usha Thorat, on the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) board. The government thus cleared the way for ONGC’s share sale.

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas appointed Usha Thorat, former Delhi University Vice-Chancellor, Deepak Nayyar and former Finance Secretary, Arun Ramanathan, as non-official part-time directors on the board of the company.

The appointments enabled ONGC to meet Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)'s listing requirement of having equal number of executive and non-executive directors. However, the timing of the public offer will be decided by the Department of Disinvestment.

The public offer in which the government plans to sell 5 per cent (427.77 million shares) was scheduled to open on 5 July and close on 8 July. However since the appointment of independent directors got delayed, the FPO will be pushed back by at least two weeks. The share sale was originally planned to happen in 2010-11 but was deferred to 5 April 2011 as the company did not have adequate number of independent directors on its board to meet SEBI's listing norm. The planned launch of the FPO on July 5 was also deferred due to the same reason.

ONGC has two government-appointed nominee directors, taking the total strength of functional/promoter directors to nine. In comparison, it has five independent directors and needed four more to meet SEBI's listing norm. Since the company does not have a full-time Chairman and Director (Human Resources), appointment of three directors would help ONGC meet SEBI norm.