Dutch financial major ING Group has sold its entire stake in the Kotak Mahindra Bank. ING Group had held 3.06 per cent stake in Kotak Mahindra Bank following the merger of its banking unit, ING Vysya Bank, with Kotak Mahindra Bank in April 2015, media reports say.
Subsequent to the stake sale completed on February 22, Mark Newman, a non-executive director at Kotak Bank resigned with immediate effect, according to a report on the MoneyControl website.
"Earlier today, ING Group sold its remaining stake in the bank. I hereby resign from my position as a director of the company with immediate effect," he said in his resignation letter which stock exchanges carried on their websites.
The 3.06 per cent stake that ING Mauritius Investments held in Kotak Mahindra Bank as of December 31, 2018, amounted to 5.8 crore shares, according to data in Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).
ING Group merged its banking unit, ING Vysya Bank, with Kotak Mahindra Bank in November 2014. After the deal concluded in April 2015, the former held 6.5 per cent stake in the merged entity but offloaded some of its shares later, the report says. Kotak Mahindra Bank fell 3.71 per cent to close at Rs 1,241.05 per share on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) as of the close on Friday.
The Business Line reported that the stake-sale took place through block deals early in the morning. The average share price was understood to be at about 5 per cent discount to Thursday's closing price. As many as 8.38 crore shares of the lender amounting to over Rs 10,000 crore were traded on Friday on both the exchanges, according to the daily.
Media reports earlier indicated that ING was keen on exiting Kotak Mahindra Bank. In November last year, it sold 0.7 per cent stake in the private sector lender for Rs 1,400 crore, according to reports.
Uday Kotak-led Kotak Mahindra Bank, headquartered in Mumbai, which is the second largest private bank by market capitalisation after HDFC Bank, has a network of 1,369 branches across 689 locations and 2,163 ATMs in the country.
The Kotak Bank's deal for acquiring ING Vysya Bank in April 2015 was valued at Rs 15,000 crore ($2.1 billion). The merger raised the staff strength of the bank to almost 40,000.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, the ING Group (Internationale Nederlanden Groep) is a multinational full-spectrum banking and financial services corporation and part of the Inter-Alpha Group of Banks, a cooperative consortium of 11 prominent European banks.
