BPC seeks $150m from foreign banks
BPC approached Citigroup Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc and Standard Chartered Plc to arrange the loan, BPC Chairman Muqtadir Ali told The Daily Star.
The banks will organise a roadshow in Singapore on September 26-27 to raise the syndicated loan.
A BPC official said if the available loan size is $200 million, the company will accept it. BPC is facing a fund crisis due to increasing imports.
The loan is a short-term oil and port financing and has an average life of six months. The loan pays a margin of 275 basis points over the London interbank offered rate, the official said.
BPC imports 26-32 lakh tonnes of petroleum products. But due to installation of quick rental power plants, demand for petroleum went up. Last year, BPC imported about 54 lakh tonnes of petroleum products.
BPC will import 68-70 lakh tonnes of petroleum products this year.
Last year, BPC paid oil import bills of more than $200 million a month, Ali said. In the current fiscal year, the monthly import bill on petroleum products will cross $300 million.
As the petroleum products were sold at a subsidised rate in the last fiscal year, Tk 8,198 crore had to be counted in subsidies. The finance ministry paid BPC Tk 5,000 crore.
Subsidy may nearly double to Tk 16,000 crore this fiscal year, Ali said.