Education, Careers & Professional News
Two IIT graduates are set to become dollar billionaires overnight
Source
toi
Date
2005-06-11
Information
LONDON: Two IIT graduates are set to become dollar billionaires overnight and take their internet gambling company, Party Gaming, into the big league of big British brands alongside British Airways, Marks and Spencer, Boots and Sainsburys by floating in London.
The two IITians, Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava, are based in the British dependency of Gibraltar, situated on a narrow rocky promontory in southern Spain.
The London Stock Exchange flotation, which Kitts confirmed would be completed by June-end, is expected to be worth $10billion.
It is the LSEs biggest flotation since the £29-billion listing of Orange, the mobile telephone company, four years ago.
Their company, founded with a Californian heiress and her husband in 1997, is to make rupee millionaires of hundreds of the call centre employees in Hyderabad.
Ian Kitts, a spokesman for Party Gaming, told TOI on Friday, just hours after the companys extraordinary rise to the very top of the blue-chip FTSE index: 5.6 per cent of the companys share capital will be allocated to its employees, which will be held in trust for them.
Financial experts in London said this meant Party Gamings 1,100 employees stood to benefit from a $550m windfall.
Individually each employee, in each of the companys three locations - Gibraltar, the UK and India - can expect to receive an average of two to three times their annual salary.