The Hindu Business Line : IOC plans to bid for Kenyan-Uganda pipeline project

INDIAN OIL Corporation plans to bid for a 320-km pipeline between the Kenyan port of Mombasa and Eldoret in Uganda. The Kenyan and Ugandan governments, which will hold 24.5 per cent stake each in the project, had invited the expressions of interest for the approximately $100-million build-own-operate-transfer project roughly one and a half years ago, in which Indian Oil participated.

The pipeline is scheduled to be commissioned in August 2007. The private participant will bring in 51 per cent equity.

Company sources said that after short-listing the expressions of interest, the consortium of Kenyan and Ugandan governments had recently invited bids from selected parties. Though the last date of submission of such bids was October 31, IOC would seek extension of the deadline by a few weeks.

The sources said that the project would be executed by IOC if the company was successful in winning the bid.

Not to back consortium bid: Apart from IOC, Petroleum India International (PII), a consortium of top oil PSUs (including IOC) in the country, had also been asked to bid for the pipeline project. IOC sources, however, confirmed that, as the company itself was bidding for the project, it would not back the PII bid.

Set up about two decades ago, PII is a single-window organisation of the Indian petroleum industry set up to operate in the upstream and downstream sectors on a global basis. IOC is a party to the consortium through IBP, CPCL and Bongaigaon Refiners and Petrochemicals Ltd. Other participants in PII are BPCL, HPCL, Engineers India Ltd and Kochi Refineries Ltd.

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