Mumbai, March 17: Bear Stearns — the beleaguered Wall Street bank which was put on a fire sale of $2 per share to JPMorgan Chase — has been scrambling to sell its holdings in Indian companies over the past week.

Estimates on the street put the Bear Stearns stock sale on the Indian bourses at Rs 300 crore.

Bear Stearns now operates as a foreign institutional investor and its investments in the domestic markets are done by BSMA, an affiliate.

BSMA has been investing in Indian companies over the past three years and it has picked up minority stakes across a clutch of companies that include Adlabs Films, Ceat, Dabur Pharma, HEG Ltd, Usha Martin, SpiceJet, and Jupiter Bioscience.

Market observers say BSMA has been a major seller over the past couple of trading sessions. Last Friday, it was a key participant in a flurry of bulk deals on the National Stock Exchange.

A look at data available from the exchange shows that BSMA sold shares in Alps Industries, Automotive Axles Ltd, Saregama India, Ceat Ltd, Dabur Pharma, HEG Ltd, Madhucon Project Ltd among others. In most of these transactions, Deutsche Securities, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch were the buyers.

BSMA continued to unwind its stock exposures in India today. It sold shares of JSW Steel, Usha Martin, Monnet Ispat, S. Kumars, Orchid Chemicals, Dredging Corporation, D.S. Kulkarni Developers, Aptech, Adhunik Metals and many others.

In Orchid Chemicals, BSMA sold around 6.50 lakh shares which sent the stock plummeting a little over 39 per cent. About 40 per cent of its market capitalisation was wiped out.

Block deals were also reported in counters such as SpiceJet where BSMA holds a little over 2 per cent of its equity and in Adlabs.

However, it could not be ascertained whether Bear Stearns was a seller in these transactions too.

“Bear Stearns has indeed been selling stocks from its portfolio here. However, the good part for the markets was that it found buyers and it turned out to be foreign institutional investors like Deutsche Securities,” said an analyst.