Istanbul to choose adviser for gas grid sale

The city of Istanbul will soon choose advisers for the sale of its natural gas distributor Istanbul Gaz Dağıtım and ferry operator Istanbul Deniz Otobüsleri, or İDO, Mayor Kadir Topbaş said.

Istanbul will pick advisers for the sales “as soon as possible,” Topbaş said in an interview in Istanbul on Wednesday. The municipality will then prepare for the sale of real estate unit Kiptaş, he said.

The city of Istanbul has received bids from Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse Group among others to handle an initial public offering or a stake sale in Istanbul Gaz, also known as İgdaş, three people familiar with the plan said on Jan. 15.

“Because this is a large sell-off, we want to be very careful in the group that we will award the advising job,” Topbaş said. “We want to choose the advisers that we believe will maximize our revenue. We will complete the sale in 2010.”

Turkey’s largest city wants to raise as much as $10 billion from selling the İgdaş and İDO stakes, Sabah newspaper reported in September, citing council records. İgdaş has about 4.2 million customers and sold almost 4 billion cubic meters of the fuel, or about 10 percent of Turkey’s annual demand, in 2008.

Credit Agricole’s Calyon is also among the bidders, the people said, joining local groups including Türkiye Sınai Kalkınma Bankası, Oyak Securities, Standard Ünlü Securities and Deniz Yatırım.