Brookfield Asset Management (Brookfield) has reportedly offered to pay more than Rs 1,100 crore for the headquarters of the debt-laden financier IL&FS.
Apart from the Canadian alternate investment company, several other private equity and real estate firms had expressed interest in the 10-storey building located in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC).
The IL&FS board had earlier put the headquarters on the block to pay Rs 99,000 crore of debt and it had estimated that the property was worth around Rs 1,200 crore.
A report in the Economic Times said the asset is being monetised through the price-discovery mechanism and no reserve price was set and that all the processes will be completed in the first quarter of the next fiscal.
The building has around 4.5 lakh sq.ft of leasable area and some of its tenants include IBM, the Carlyle group and Paypal. The IL&FS group occupies some floors of the building and is expected to vacate them once the deal is finalised.
Last month, the IL&FS group said in an affidavit filed before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) that it would resolve its debt of Rs 55,000 crore by March 2022. This was disclosed while it was updating the progress of the resolution progress.
According to the IL&FS board, which is led by veteran banker Uday Kotak, this sum of Rs 55,000 crore would be resolved through asset monetisation, restructuring and insolvency proceeding initiatives.
The group had a total outstanding debt of Rs 99,355 crore as of October 8, 2018, of which Rs 45,500 crore debt is handled through debt resolution initiatives by March 2022.
Of this, debt of Rs 20,500 crore was already resolved through monetisation, Rs 4,000 crore by way of debt discharged and Rs 21,350 crore in cash available across companies and Invit unit (Infrastructure Investment Trust) due to be issued. The board had also said that it expects to resolve Rs 5,300 crore through various "transactions approved by the relevant court/tribunal and pending transaction closure" and Rs 4,200 crore from resolution applications filed with courts and pending approvals.
