Northstar, Amstel eye Newmont shares

A consortium of local governments in West Nusa Tenggara has been approached by several foreign companies ? including Amsterdam-based Amstel Securities and Northstar Pacific Partners ?? about teaming up to purchase stakes in PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara (NNT), The Jakarta Globe reported Tuesday.

?We have just met with the Amstel,? Heriyadi Rachmat, chief of West Nusa Tenggara?s mining department, said on Monday. ?The company presented their profile and explained to us how they intended to finance the purchase of Newmont?s shares.?

?However, we did not make any promises to them since the valuation of the shares has not been determined yet,? he added. Rachmat said Amstel was willing to help the governments buy as many shares as they wanted.

Provincial spokesman Andy Hadianto acknowledged that Northstar Pacific, a private equity arm of US-based Texas Pacific Group, was one of several companies that had shown an interest in helping them acquire the Newmont stake. But Rachmat said that the company had not met with the local governments yet.

?Only Amstel has presented their profile to us officially,? he said. ?State-owned companies like PT Aneka Tambang and PT Timah have also expressed interest, but only verbally so far.?

The discussions came as the government postponed its plan to recruit an independent appraiser to value the stakes in NNT for another two weeks.

The government and NNT had initially agreed to appoint an independent assessment team to calculate the value of NNT assets for the divestment process if both sides failed to reach an agreement by June 15, 2009.

Earlier, NNT said its asset is worth US$4.97 billion this year. The value of the 7 percent stake in the company it was required to divest for 2008 is $348 million, while the value of the 7 percent it has to divest this year is $462 million.

The government, meanwhile, estimated that the firm's asset value for this year would not top $4 billion. (*)