India’s leading telecom company is looking to raise Rs 8,000 crore through corporate bonds. Reliance Jio Infocomm will be selling corporate bonds in the local market sometime next week in order to raise funds, reported The Economic Times. The corpus raised from the bonds will be used to pay off the dues that the company has accrued from purchasing spectrum in the 2014 and 2015 auctions, people with knowledge of the matter told ET.

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The bonds are expected to be of five-year and three-year or two-year tenures, offering an interest rate of about 6.2 percent and 5.35 percent. Lenders like Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and State Bank of India are being looked at by the company to raise Rs 5,000 crore via five-year bonds, while shorter bonds are being offered to top mutual funds to acquire another Rs 3,000 crore.

While the Mukesh Ambani-owned company had cleared its dues for the spectrum purchases made in 2016, the company still owed around Rs 15,000-16,000 crore, with interest included, from the partial dues that remained from the 2015 and 2014 spectrum auctions.

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The company at the time had purchased a total of Rs 11,054 crore worth of spectrum in 2014, and additional spectrum worth Rs 10,077 crore in 2015.

Unlike its major rivals Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, Jio Infocomm has not taken the recently announced deferment options that the Centre is offering to the beleaguered sector. The government has offered telecom companies the options of a four-year moratorium on the spectrum and adjusted gross revenue (AGR) payments.

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But while Airtel and Vi have been struggling with their finances, Jio Infocomm is in much better financial health and hopes to clear the dues via the avenue of corporate bonds, as their interest rates are much lower than the 10 percent rate the government charges on the moratorium.

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(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)