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Invesco Developing Markets Fund, which owns 18 per cent stake in Zee Entertainment, has backed the Zee merger with Sony and has decided not to pursue litigation against Zee.

In a statement, the company said it is pleased with the Bombay High Court’s ruling, which is an important reaffirmation of shareholder rights in India and the mechanisms under Indian law to hold Boards accountable to their shareholders. "The ruling is a boon for corporate governance in India and a win for shareholder democracy," it said.

"Since we announced our intention to requisition an EGM and add six independent directors to Zee’s Board of Directors, Zee has entered into a merger agreement with Sony. We continue to believe this deal in its current form has great potential for Zee shareholders. We also recognize that, following the merger’s consummation, the board of the newly combined company will be substantially reconstituted, which will achieve our objective of strengthening board oversight of the company. Given these developments, and our desire to facilitate the transaction, we have decided not to pursue the EGM as per our requisition dated September 11 2021," it said.

Invesco will continue to monitor the proposed merger’s progress. If the merger is not completed as currently proposed, Invesco retains the right to requisition a fresh EGM, it said.

Zee Entertainment, however, has three weeks time from the Bombay High Court to move the Supreme Court to appeal against Bombay HC order.

Read Also:- Indraprastha Gas hikes prices of domestic piped natural gas in Delhi-NCR: Check rates

Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL) has hiked the price of domestic piped natural gas in Delhi by Rs 1 per standard cubic metre (SCM) to Rs 36.61 per unit.

In Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad domestic PNG will now cost Rs 35.86 per SCM. In Gurugram, it will be Rs 34.42 per SCM, as per the new rates.

Also Read: Petrol, diesel retail prices raised by 80 paise in 2nd straight hike after 137-day freeze

The increase in PNG rates comes on the heels of oil marketing companies hiking petrol and diesel prices after a 137 day freeze.

Petrol and diesel prices were hiked by 80 paise a litre each for two days in a row. Petrol in Delhi now costs Rs 97.01 per litre as against Rs 96.21 previously while diesel has gone from Rs 87.47 to Rs 88.27 per litre.

Lebanon bought the bulk of its wheat from Ukraine until Russia invaded, and the World Bank has warned it is one of a number of developing countries that face near-term wheat supply shortages as a result.

The Lebanese government has asked the central bank for a $26 million advance to launch the tender, economy minister Amin Salam said, adding that the tender would be launched very quickly once the credit line was opened.

"India is the first state to give me a final answer on quantities and tomorrow it will give me answer on the price," Salam said.

Lebanon was still waiting to hear from the United States and Kazakhstan on specifications and prices, he said.

Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani tiptoed around each other for years to reach the top two rungs of Asia’s wealth ladder. While one of them built an empire in telecom and retail, the other established a lock on transport and energy distribution. Increasingly, though, the two billionaires from India’s Gujarat state are starting to overlap, setting the stage for a clash that could alter the country’s business landscape. Given the duo’s proximity to politics, the shock is bound to reverberate through the corridors of power as well.

In the latest sign of their coalescing orbits, the Adani Group has discussed the idea of buying a stake in Saudi Aramco from the oil-rich kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, potentially linking the investment to a broader tie-up or asset swap deal, according to Bloomberg News. This is just months after Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. and Aramco called off more than two years of talks to sell 20% of the Indian conglomerate’s oils-to-chemicals unit to the Saudi behemoth for about $20 billion to $25 billion-worth of Aramco shares. In an attempt to cement the partnership, Reliance even got Aramco chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan to join its board as an independent director last year.

Aramco, the No. 1 crude oil producer, is still a better fit with Ambani’s Reliance, which owns the world’s largest refining complex at Jamnagar in Gujarat. Reliance is also a leading manufacturer of polymers, polyester and fiber-intermediates. But, Adani, too, has wanted to enter petrochemicals by putting up a $4 billion acrylics complex near his Mundra port in Gujarat in collaboration with BASF SE, Borealis AG, and Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., or Adnoc. Covid-19 put a dampener on the plan. This wasn’t the first retreat from his petro-ambitions: Nothing also came of a plant in Gujarat, which was looking to rope in Taiwan’s CPC Corp.

Adani’s main interest in hydrocarbons continues to be coal. He mines it in India and Indonesia, produces coal-fueled power at plants like the one in Mundra and berths vessels laden with the stuff at his vast network of ports. Exports of coal from the Carmichael mine would start soon, the group said in December, after slogging for a decade over the environmentally controversial project in Australia’s Galilee Basin. But while coal is very much India’s past and present, it’s not the future. Which is why Adani made a big bet on solar power. He also started circling around plastics.

after Adani set up a new petrochemicals subsidiary last year, it became clear that sooner or later he was going to try and breach the moat of stable cash-flows established by the rival group’s founder Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s “Polyester Prince” (and father of Reliance’s current boss). The tantalizing question is whether Adani’s ambitions include a refinery as well.

Back in 2018, Aramco and Adnoc were going to partner with state-owned Indian firms to set up a mammoth $44-billion refinery. That plan has gone nowhere after the project lost its original site in India’s Maharashtra state because of local political opposition. Could the Adani Group insert itself into a revival of that project? For now, the preliminary talks with Aramco seem to have a modest focus: collaboration in renewable energy, crop nutrients or chemicals, according to Bloomberg News. However, if Aramco is still keen on owning a captive refinery in India, the contours of its Adani partnership might well expand.

That would put the billionaires in direct competition — though not for the first time. In June last year, Ambani told his shareholders he was embarking on his life’s “most challenging” undertaking by making a pivot to clean power and fuel. He followed up with a blitzkrieg of acquisitions in the field. Before that, it was Adani who wanted to be the world’s largest renewable energy producer by 2030. By revealing his plans for four gigafactories in Jamnagar — one each for solar panels, batteries, green hydrogen and fuel cells — Ambani put Reliance in the lead role in India’s climate-change narrative. And he did it just before the COP26 summit in Glasgow where Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a bold commitment to lower the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Analysts like to clump Ambani and Adani together as a kind of India Inc. duopoly. “By backing the ‘2As’ at the expense of other companies, both domestic and foreign, the government is encouraging an extraordinary concentration of economic power,” economist Arvind Subramanian, an adviser to the Modi administration until 2018, and Josh Felman, a former International Monetary Fund official in New Delhi, wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article about how India’s inward turn could stymie its rise.

The two superstar business groups are indeed reducing the competitive intensity in the broader economy by swallowing smaller and weaker firms adjacent to their operations. Still, every indication suggests they’ll compete fiercely against each other. Ambani took the telecom route to emerge as the czar of India’s consumer data; Adani wants to come in from the other end by providing storage services to bits and bytes, powered by green energy. Ambani is engaged in a brutal contest with Amazon.com Inc. for control of the grocery supply chain. Adani warehouses grain for the state-run Food Corp. of India and owns the country’s No. 1 edible oil brand.

Their balance sheets are different. For the past five years, firms linked to Adani have been hyperactive in the international debt market, borrowing more than any other Indian company. Ambani, meanwhile, has turned Reliance into a sparsely leveraged fortress--not a bad place to be as global interest rates harden. Visions are different, too. While Adani, 59, supplies grid power (and cooking gas, in partnership with with France’s TotalEnergies SE) to households, Ambani, who’s five years older, imagines a future in which “every house, every farm, factory and habitat could, in principle, free itself from the grid by generating its own power.” Will the two billionaires try to shape policies--and influence politics--according to their competing goals? You bet. A confrontation looks almost guaranteed. Investors in India should grab some popcorn.

Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday said rapid strides in technology and green fuel will reduce the cost of electric automobiles, bringing them at par with petrol-run vehicles in the next two years.

Replying in the Lok Sabha on the Demands for Grants for Road Transport and Highways Ministry, 2022-23, Gadkari emphasised the need to shift to cost-effective indigenous fuel and hoped that this fuel will be a reality soon, bringing the pollution levels down and improving the overall situation in Delhi.

Urging MPs to adopt hydrogen technologies for transport, Gadkari asked them to take initiative in their respective districts for converting sewage water to produce green hydrogen.

Hydrogen will soon be the cheapest fuel alternative, he said.

"I can say within maximum two years, the cost of electric scooter, car, autoricksahw will be same as petrol-driven scooter, car, autorickshaw. Prices of lithium-ion battery are coming down. We are developing this chemistry of zinc-ion, aluminium-ion, sodium-ion batteries. If petrol, you are spending Rs 100, then on electric vehicle you will spend Rs 10 (for using)," Gadkari said.

Click Here:- Share Market Closing Note- Sharetipsinfo

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas released its monthly production report for February 2022 today, on March 22.

As per the report, crude oil production failed to meet target while also lower in terms of year-on-year (YoY) data for the period; while natural gas production was higher in YoY terms, but still lower than the monthly target.

Further, crude oil processed during the month was lower than target, but higher YoY basis; and production of petroleum products was higher — in both target for the month and YoY numbers.

Here are the details of the report.

Crude Oil Production data for February 2022:

After weeks of worrying rhetoric, the US is sending over one of its top diplomats in an effort to calm the nerves of policymakers in New Delhi and provide an assurance that India will not face sanctions over its business and military ties to Russia, sources in the know told Moneycontrol.

US assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs Donald Lu will be in India on Tuesday on a one-day visit. Lu’s visit gains significance against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, which has seen India and the US take opposing diplomatic stances. Incidentally, Lu is the same US official who had been in the news for saying earlier this month that India’s defence deals with Russia remain plausible ground for sanctions and that US President Joe Biden was still considering his options.

India has faced flak from US lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, for choosing to abstain from multiple votes at the United Nations condemning Russia’s unilateral attack on Ukraine. The Biden administration has also been irked by India’s refusal to stop trade with Russia nearly a month after the invasion began.

Speaking at the Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting at the White House on March 21, Biden said that while some members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) like Japan and Australia have responded to Russia’s aggression strongly, India has been “somewhat shaky” on some of the issues, ANI reported.

However, multiple diplomatic sources said Lu is expected to convey to the ministry of external affairs (MEA) that the bilateral strategic partnership and business ties between the US and India trump other diplomatic positions.

“There has been a lot of mudslinging between New Delhi and Washington, DC, with politicians making unwarranted comments. The leaders have been restrained till now but they are also beholden to the political mood at home. We feel a clean break is in order at this point,” a senior US diplomat said.

Lu had told members of the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counter-terrorism on March 9 that it was for Biden to decide whether to apply or waive sanctions on India. He had also stressed that while the Biden administration will fully follow and implement the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) law, India remained an extremely important security partner of the US.

“Lu is expected to repeat the same in Delhi. However, the US has continued to ask all partners, including India, to reduce ties with Russia, while India has maintained it will take independent decisions based on national security,” an MEA official said.

CAATSA scare

Signed by President Donald Trump in 2017, CAATSA “seeks to counter Russian influence in Europe and curb Iran’s ballistic missile program and targets the rogue regime in North Korea”, according to the US Congress. While it has been a major force in diplomatic negotiations, the legislation has not been used till now against any other country.

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen calls from the US Congress to tighten CAATSA further and cut off Russia’s ability to export its weapons. Beyond this, Washington, DC, is now making sure that it becomes very hard for any country to buy major weapons systems from Russia as a result of the sanctions in place on Russian banks.

Significantly for India, CAATSA has provisions to impose economic and financial sanctions against countries that engage in significant transactions with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.

Enacted in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and its alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, it authorises the US administration to impose sanctions on countries that purchase major defence hardware from Russia.

India has repeatedly run afoul of the rule owing to its existing deep defence ties with Russia but the US has not gone beyond the occasional rebuke, choosing to settle matters in private.

After CAATSA kicked in, India inked a $5.43-billion deal with Russia to procure four S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence systems in October 2018.

The same year, it also purchased significant amounts of crude oil from Iran. However, after being prodded by the US, the government has since moved away from Iranian crude. After reaching a high of $12.3 billion worth of imports in 2018-19, the import of crude oil from Iran plummeted to $1 billion in 2019-20 and completely stopped thereafter.

With regards to Indian defence acquisitions from Russia, Lu had also told the US Congress that India had cancelled large orders of MiG-29 fighter jets, Russian helicopters and anti-tank weapons. India has, however, not officially confirmed this. “The government is studying whether the fighter jets order can be redirected to domestic players in the spirit of Make in India. No further decision has been taken,” a senior official said.