New Delhi, May 02: Petronet LNG Ltd, the country's first Liquified Natural Gas importer, is likely to launch twin bond issues of Rs 525 crore each next month to pre-pay high cost debt and fund expansion of its Dahej terminal in Gujarat. "The first issue of Rs 525 crore would be guaranteed by the Asian Development Bank and will be for replacing term loan," PLL director (finance) P Dasgupta told here.

ICICI Securities has been appointed the lead arranger while standard chartered and JM Morgan Stanley are co-arrangers for the privately placed bonds issue. The proceeds of the issue would prepay part of the Rs 1825 crore debt PLL raised for constructing India's maiden LNG import terminal at Dahej in Gujarat. "Project loans were raised at about 9 per cent and the ADB-guaranteed bonds would carry a coupon rate of 6.25 per cent, thereby reducing our interest outgo," he said adding PLL's agreement with the consortium of 14 banks which lent Rs 1825 crore, has no pre-payment liability.

Petronet, which hopes to clock 1.3 billion dollar turnover by selling 5 million tonnes of LNG imported from Qatar from next fiscal, will raise another Rs 525 crore to meet the debt portion of the Rs 750 crore expansion of the Dahej terminal capacity to 10 million tonnes by 2007-08.

"We have asked standard chartered to arrange for a guarantee of 70 million dollars from World Bank, FMO, Netherlands or any other multilateral agency for the issue by the month end as construction on the expansion would begin by July," Dasgupta said. Bureau Report