A senior official of Indal, a subsidiary of Alcan, said that details regarding the proportion in which both the promoters would share the Tata stake were still being worked out and a decision would be taken soon.

Earlier, Tata Industries Limited, one of the three promoters of Utkal Alumina, had announced that it would withdraw from the project as it would not help the group in entering the downstream aluminium business.

The Tatas also expressed willingness that the share capital contributed by them for the project be refunded. With a share capital base of Rs 60 crore, the equity of Utkal Alumina was shared between Hydro, Alcan, Indal and the Tatas in the proportion 4:2:2:2.

According to the Tatas, an amount of Rs 15 crore had already been sunk towards theircontribution for the project.

Meanwhile, Larsen & Toubro, the engineering, construction and cement giant, has decided to revive the one million tonne alumina project which it was forced to defer when partner Alcoa of USA chose to walk out from the venture in 1995.

This time around L&T wants to be in the project only as a minority partner and engineering-procurement-construction (EPC) contractor, instead of going for an equal joint venture which was its original plan. Most international aluminium giants have lined up at L&T's doors, say sources, adding that even Alcoa has evinced renewed interest after rival Alcan chose to increase its presence in the country. Sources close to the negotiations say that Pechiney of France, the world's largest aluminium company, has nosed ahead of the other aluminium multinationals.

L&T officials said that the partner is likely to be finalised within the next one month. The project, as had been earlier planned, will come up in Orissa and is likely to cost around $1billion. An L&T official said: "It is wrong to say that we have revived the alumina project. We had never shelved it in the first place. All we were looking for is the right partner, and the financial viability of the project."

Pechiney's presence in India is restricted only as a technology partner to National Aluminium, the public sector major, but does not have any equity presence in any Indian aluminium companies. It has recently signed an agreement with Sterlite Industries for transfer of technology to its proposed greenfield smelter.

The project, if it finally takes off, will be the third export-oriented alumina project in the country. Apart from Indal, the Gujarat government has also managed to rope in new partners, after Raytheon walked out, in a 7.5 lakh tonne per annum alumina project in Kutch.

L&T has earlier faced severe criticism from investors, in particular the foreign institutional investors (FII), for its decisions to diversify into alumina and steel. L&T had last year announced shelvingof a severely-criticised steel project proposal while it had remained non-committal on the alumina project.

H-P unveils new servers
NEW YORK: Hewlett-Packard Co announced a new line of midrange servers, plugging a gap in its product line and putting it back into competition with Sun Microsystems Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.

Analysts said H-P's N-Class servers, priced starting at $48,000, should help the Palo Alto, Calif, computer giant catch up to its competitors in the market for servers, powerful computers that increasingly run everything from corporate networks to Internet-based electronic commerce. The new machines are designed to pick up the slack from the company's aging K-Class line, whose sales started to wane late last year, analysts said.