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The CP2 consortium’s $2.2 billion friendly takeover offer for ConnectEast ends a long and disappointing ride for investors in Melbourne’s EastLink tollroad owner and operator.
The company floated at $1 a share on the back of overly-optimistic traffic forecasts in 2004, and if the CPU scheme of arrangement takeover goes through, investors will get 55 cents a share, cash. There have however been far worse results for tollroad investors – the disastrous RiverCity float in Brisbane comes immediately to mind – and the bidders have shaped their offer carefully.
The key is that ConnectEast has gone to shareholders twice with two discounted share issues. A three-for-eight issue in 2008 pitched at 55 cents that raised $450 million, and then a one-for-two at 33 cents in 2009 that raised another $420 million.
Institutions that backed them averaged down, reducing the average cost of their shareholdings.
CPU is a specialty infrastructure investor, and controls 35.1 per cent of ConnectEast already through an investor consortium that counts New Zealand Superannuation Fund, ATP of Denmark and Universities Superannuation Scheme of the UK.
Cable & Wireless Communications (C&WC) saw declines in mobile subscribers in its Caribbean and Panamanian units during its fiscal first quarter, ended June 30, which the company attributed to reductions in prepaid usage and a continued difficult market situation in Jamaica, the company said in a statement.
In an interim management statement, the company gave an update on its operations in the first quarter of its fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2012, in its four markets – the Caribbean, Panama, Macau and Monaco & Islands.
CARIBBEAN
Speaking on a conference call with investors, company CFO Tim Pennington said that first quarter performance in the Caribbean was in line with expectations set out in May and that the decline in mobile subscribers was due to its discontinuing of certain promotional activities.
C&WC’s mobile subscriber numbers in the Caribbean were down 8.14% at the end of June to 1.23mn compared to 1.34mn the same date last year.
Yasser El-Ansary.
RETAILERS would receive little relief from an option considered by Canberra to halve the GST-free threshold for imported goods, figures suggest.
It was revealed last week that the government had last year examined cutting the threshold from $1000 to $500 amid complaints by retailers about competition from foreign online stores.
But two of the biggest players in online shopping, eBay and PayPal, say such a move would only affect a small minority of their online transactions. A tax expert also said this type of cut would do little to address the woes afflicting the retail industry.
PayPal, a leading online payments company, said cutting the threshold to $500 would affect less than 10 per cent of Australians’ purchases of overseas goods.
“A very low single-digit percentage of PayPal Australia’s overseas transactions are priced in excess of $500,” the company said.
A spokesman for online giant eBay, Daniel Feiler, also also said the bulk of overseas purchases by Australians were worth less than $500.
Caribbean telecoms regulators should do a cost-benefit analysis of number portability before mandating operators to implement it, regional operator Digicel’s head of telecoms public policy, Julian Wilkins, told BNamericas.
Speaking about the issue at The Caribbean Association of National Telecommunications Organizations’ (CANTO) annual trade fair in Suriname last week, Wilkins raised questions about the logic of implementing number portability in small countries, given the technology’s high costs for such markets.
“Digicel feels that mobile NP is very expensive to implement and in the essence, Who pays for your costs? You’re trying to cover a small population,” Wilkins said.
He drew attention to countries that have implemented NP in Latin America, such as Ecuador, where within a year of installing NP less than 0.5% of mobile subscribers ported their numbers. In Ecuador, subscribers are entitled to porting twice a year at no cost.
In Peru, the demand for porting numbers was less than 0.4% in the first 12 months.
– European government officials and commercial bankers struggled to reconcile competing proposals for a second bailout of Greece on Monday, just three days before a summit meeting called to prevent the crisis from spreading through the region.
French government spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse said she believed the summit of the euro zone’s 17 national leaders scheduled for Thursday in Brussels would agree on a rescue of Greece, supplementing a 110 billion euro bailout launched in May last year.
But after three weeks of preparatory talks, it was unclear how a consensus could be reached on a way for private owners of Greek government bonds — banks, insurers and other investors — to contribute to the bailout by taking cuts in the face value of their holdings.
Imposing a small tax on all euro area banks is under active consideration as a possible alternative to more risky forms of private sector involvement, a source familiar with the talks said, confirming a German media report.
The source also said officials were considering measures to try to prevent the fallout from the Greek crisis from damaging financial markets globally.
Fears that the rescue of Greece might fail, leading eventually to a disorderly debt default, pushed the euro down against other currencies and bond yields of highly indebted euro zone governments rose.