Premji to unload 5 p.c. of his Wipro stakes

BANGALORE, INDIA: Abiding by the regulation of Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Wipro chairman Azim Premji will be selling off five per cent stake in the company as and when required.

Speaking to media here today, Azim Premji said, “According to SEBI regulation; the promoters can retain only up to 75 percent of the stake in the company, so complying with that I will look at floating that remaining five percent of the stake. Since the regulation does not articulate well about the period of complying with the regulation, I would retain the 80 per cent stake for the time being.” SEBI recently announced that all listed companies have to bring down their promoters’ holdings to 75 per cent within the next two years. There were reports that SEBI also asked Azim Premji to offload his 7.37 stake from the company.

In an unrelated move, he added that the company would also participate in the UID project, headed by Nandan Nilekani.

Suresh Vaswani, Jt. chief executive officer of Wipro’s IT business and a member of the Board, said that Wipro would participate in the bidding process as System Integrators (SI).

“As per the government regulation, a company can participate either as an SI or in consulting. Going by that we would be only participating as SI,” he said.