WRT - Westfield Retail Trust

[VSntchr]

Personally I think the independent directors of WRT should be sacked for failing to act in the interests of all the WRT shareholders. The meeting has been postponed for up to a fortnight. It would be interesting to see if ASIC takes any interest, even if only to look after the small retail share holders that appear to be being steamrolled.

I was reading the news flow yesterday and couldn't help but chuckle each time the reporter would make another joke about something causing a delay in the meeting.

On a more serious note though, it really doesn't feel like a publicly owned company does it!?

 

[nulla nulla]

The proposed restructure of Westfield Group (WDC) and Westfield Retail Trust (WRT) where in Westfield Trust would become Scentre and acquire Australian & New Zealand assets from the Westfield Group hit a big snag yesterday when less than 75% of WRT shareholders approved the deal. Proxies in favor of the restructure, counted before the meeting, totaled 74.1% and it appeared there was insufficient support at the meeting to carry the vote.

WRT shareholders were in uproar after learning that in the WDC meeting held in the morning, Frank Lowy advised the WDC shareholders that they would proceed with the demerger of Aussie & NZ assets even if they didn't get approval for the restructure from WRT shareholders. The situation was not helped when it was disclosed that the Lowys had discussed this with some major shareholders in the week leading up to the meeting, where the market in general had not been advised.

While the proposed restructure would not have a negative impact on those fund managers that have a portfolio of proportionally weighted investments in both WDC and WRT (what they gain in WDC is balanced by what they lose in WRT), the proposal does have a negative impact on those WRT share holders that do not have WDC shares or a balanced portfolio weighting of shares in WDC.

In effect the proposal is for WRT to rename as Scentre and buy out the Australian & New Zealand WDC assets through the issue of scrip in Scentre to WDC shareholders and to take on debt from WDC. This would result in WRT going from a debt gearing of 21.5% to 38%, a NTA of $3.47 to a NTA of $2.81 and end up with borrowings going from $2.9B to $10.9B. Understandably the WRT share holders didn't think this reasonable even with the so called sweetener of $300m less debt.

Personally I think the independent directors of WRT should be sacked for failing to act in the interests of all the WRT shareholders. The meeting has been postponed for up to a fortnight. It would be interesting to see if ASIC takes any interest, even if only to look after the small retail share holders that appear to be being steamrolled.

This post was originally put up before 8:00am today but appears to have been deleted when the site upgrade was implemented. Thank you Joe for retrieving it and enabling me to repost it without having to type it again etc.

 

[nulla nulla]

I was reading the news flow yesterday and couldn't help but chuckle each time the reporter would make another joke about something causing a delay in the meeting.

On a more serious note though, it really doesn't feel like a publicly owned company does it!?

Seems to be treated as a personal milking machine with all the cream going to a select few.