SC Global’s Chairman and CEO, Mr Simon Cheong, announced a couple of days ago that he has made a voluntary unconditional cash offer for all the issued ordinary share capital of SGX Mainboard-listed SC Global Developments Ltd.
The offer price is at $1.80 which is almost a 50% premium to the price at the time the offer was made.
Mr Cheong currently owns or controls a total of 227,754,960 shares in SC Global representing approximately 55.06% of the issued share capital of the Company.
If he can accumulate 90% of the shares via the offer, he intends to exercise his right to compulsorily acquire all the remaining Shares that were not acquired under the Offer and privatise (de-list) the company.
The official reasons given for this privatisation offer is as follows:
- The low trading liquidity of the Shares limits the usefulness of a public listing.
- The Company has not accessed the capital markets for funds for at least the last six years.
- The privatisation will allow management to have greater flexibility to manage and plan its residential property development business as the Company will not need to report its performance on a quarterly basis.
- The privatisation will allow the Company to dispense with listing-related expenses and enable it to instead channel its resources to its business operations.
A Maybank-Kim Eng analyst has very sharply spotted another reason for the privatisation. This reason is probably more significant than all the other reasons combined. This was reported by Magdalen Ng in today’s Straits Times.
SC Global could lose $72m if privatisation bid fails (Straits Times)
Ok, so we need to get rid of all the foreign shareholders in order not to pay the government the extension charges. The only way to do this for a public-listed company is to delist it.
The number of unsold units in the high-end property market is astonishing.