Seoul won’t sell Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) to a foreign company to avoid any possible leakage of technologies, the government said, Tuesday.

“We will keep our basic stance of not selling Daewoo Shipbuilding to a foreign company because the shipyard is a major defense industry company,” an official at the Public Fund Oversight Committee (PFOC) told The Korea Times by telephone.

The PFOC was set up under the Financial Services Committee (FSC) in 2009 to dispose of state assets following the financial crisis.

The response comes after a Russian consortium led by the state oil company OAO Rosneft recently expressed an interest in acquiring a stake in the world’s third-biggest shipbuilder by sales. The consortium also includes Gazprom, Russia’s state-run gas provider and Sovkomflot, Russia’s state-owned shipping company.

“Last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Seoul for a summit, Daewoo signed an initial agreement with the Rosneft-led consortium to offer technological support to its shipyard renovation project in Vladivostok,” said the PFOC official.

At the time, the Russian consortium offered to buy a controlling stake in the Korean shipyard on the sidelines of the initial agreement. “But little attention was paid to the offer,” according to the official.

He said that the Seoul government and the three-party consortium are “not in talks” to discuss the sale of Daewoo Shipbuilding.

Daewoo confirmed that they signed a memorandum of understanding to help transform a shipyard in Vladivostok formerly used to build submarines into a commercial shipyard for high-end liquefied natural gas carriers.

The state-run Korea Development Bank owns a 31.46 percent stake in the Daewoo shipyard, followed by the FSC with 12.15 percent and the remaining 43.61 percent held by foreigners, institutions and individual shareholders.

For a multinational company to acquire Daewoo Shipbuilding which also builds submarines and warships, it requires an approval from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

Still, Daewoo Shipbuilding won’t likely be put up for sale for the time being due to a delayed recovery in the shipbuilding industry, according to the KDB.

“For now, there is no buyer to buy the stake in the shipbuilder as the shipbuilding sector is still undergoing a prolonged slump,” a KDB official said.

Back in 2008, Hanwha Group, the chemicals-to-financial conglomerate, joined the bid to acquire Daewoo Shipbuilding to diversify its business portfolio.

It offered the highest price of about 6 trillion won ($5.7 billion) to become the preferred bidder for a majority 50.37 percent stake in the shipyard. But it dropped out of the bid due to the financial crisis that erupted the following year.