OnMarket in the news

A new tool from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) will help the boards of listed companies better meet their corporate governance obligations around capital raisings and address concerns that some primary market issues lack transparency and disadvantage small investors.

One of the curious aspects of the proposal for an ASX-operated bookbuild facility for capital raising that the ASX unveiled last week is the way in which the investment banks are characterising it as an assault on their franchises while the ASX is trying to ...

Earlier this year, retail investors were shocked to learn they would only get a fraction of the deeply discounted stock QBE Insurance was giving away as it tried to raise money to repair its balance sheet.

The Australian Securities Exchange has received critical support from fund managers and shareholder representatives over its radical plan to carry out book-builds for company floats and capital raisings.

An Australian Securities Exchange proposal to compete with brokers and investment banks in a key part of the capital raising market should be welcomed as introducing more competition and transparency.

 Australia's main exchange is hoping to launch what it claims is the world's first product to allow companies to build their own books for initial public offerings and capital raising. Until now, bookbuilding has always been the exclusive domain of investment banks, which decide ...

THE Australian Securities Exchange has taken the first step to potentially break the investment banks' control of the equities capital market by proposing to manage the book-build process. The present system is led by the banks who run in-house auctions to raise equity ...

The Australian Securities Exchange is on a collision course with the country's biggest investment banks over a plan to conduct book-builds of allocations for company floats and capital raisings openly on the market itself.

Junior mining companies are increasingly resorting to heavily discounted rights issues to fund projects amid fears the resources boom has peaked. In late June, the small resources index hit its lowest level in three years.

BILLABONG is a textbook case on what can happen to shareholders in the wrong company at the wrong time -- a stock selling at $6.42 one year ago will open next week at closer to $1 a share. The litany of shareholder disasters is primarily due to the collapse in ...

Elmer Funke Kupper ’s latest effort to ensure the Australian Securities Exchange can maintain its competitive position while making it ­easier for mid- and small-cap companies to raise capital is a welcome move and not a wholesale attack on shareholder rights.

SHAREHOLDERS are being mugged mercilessly but you won't see it on the nightly news. The market isn't the culprit I have in mind either, not that it's covered itself in glory. This is about boards behaving badly - those handing over shares so discounted as to be free ...

Guy Foster put on a brave face as he tried to hold the investment banking line against one barrage after another from the big three investors who had lined up in the amphitheatre of Melbourne Business Schol last Tuesday.

HAVE the bad old days of capital raisings, with select shareholders given preferential treatment, returned to haunt us? That's the question being asked following a pair of highly scrutinised share issues worth more than $1 billion by QBE and Bank of Queensland.

QBE has insisted it tried to favour retail investors under a $600 million capital raising despite the smaller shareholders being left scrambling for stock this week. The comments came as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission warned it may seek to toughen laws ...

Fund managers have strengthened the push for an overhaul of capital-raising structures and practices in Australia as the corporate regulator called on company boards to do a better job of explaining them to shareholders.

FUND managers have called for directors to ensure that capital raisings are fair for all -- or risk alienating key shareholders. Following a heavily criticised share placement and rights issue from the Bank of Queensland, a group of fund managers at yesterdays Ownership Matters ...

“We’re concerned about fairness, transparency, price, allocations and costs” in initial public offerings and secondary share sales, says Telstra Super's John Eliopoulos. Guy Foster, head of equity capital markets in Australia for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was red in the face.

Long-term equity holders have accused Australian company directors of being unaware of the effects of capital raisings on existing shareholders. The comments came yesterday at a heated panel discussion on the ethics of capital raisings held by institutional governance ...

AUSTRALIA's corporate regulator has told companies they should voluntarily disclose more information about capital raisings, warning that it may seek to toughen laws if shareholders are repeatedly disadvantaged in raisings.

Some of Australia's biggest institutional investors have reignited concerns about how companies are conducting equity raisings, arguing that share placements are not always managed in a fair and equitable manner.

Speed and execution were central as Bank of Queensland boss Stuart Grimshaw kicked off $450 million capital raising this week, at the same time as he revealed a surge in bad debt provisions. The raising has, however, opened old wounds among some large shareholders.

First, so far as the directors are concerned, by presiding over the big losses that have sent BoQ sharply into the red in the six months just completed. And which raises a very serious question over the broad profitability of the bank, but even more its operating business ...