CAIRN Energy is reportedly selling 66 million shares in its Cairn India unit in a deal worth more than £227 million.
Reports suggested the order book for the deal will open today with Citigroup appointed to handle the transactions.
Edinburgh-based oil and gas explorer Cairn owns a 21.79% stake in the Indian business with more than 415 million shares.
Even if it does offload 66 million shares it would still be the second-largest stake holder in Cairn India.
The majority stake was acquired by Vedanta Resources after a long takeover process which involved months of wrangling with ministers in India.
Vedanta eventually paid around $6 billion (£3.8bn) to Cairn Energy for a 58.5% stake. The main attraction was the Mangala Area in Rajasthan which is thought to contain up to one billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Oil has been produced there since 2009 and is expected to meet about 6% of Indian demand over the next few years.
Cairn then announced it was returning $3.5bn of the $5.5bn it made on the deal to shareholders.
It was estimated Cairn founder Sir Bill Gammell would have received more than £4m as his personal stake in the business was around 3.2 million shares.
Sir Bill had been due to receive a further £2.5m of free shares for securing the lucrative sale of the Indian operations but the company was forced to withdraw the payments earlier this year when it became apparent investors would vote down the one-off bonus. Cairn did not comment last night.
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