Last December, HSBC announced that it would buy a 14.6% stake in UTI Bank, a profitable private bank, from Actis, a UK private equity firm, with an option to buy another 5.4% once the regulators cleared the purchase.
Had HSBC acquired the entire 20% Actis stake, it would have had to make a general offer to buy another 20% from UTI Bank’s shareholders, and could have emerged as UTI Bank’s single largest shareholder.
