Yesterday, Property and Building Ltd. (TASE: PTBL) sold of part of its holding in Bayside Land Corp. Ltd.(Gav Yam) (TASE: BYSD1), as a step towards relinquishing control of the company in order to comply with the Concentration Law. Property and Building sold 11.7% of Bayside to investment institutions for NIS 460 million.
The sale was at a price of NIS 1,830 per share, which represents a discount of 3.5% on Bayside's closing price yesterday. Epsilon Underwriting & Issuing brokered the sale.
Following yesterday's sale, Property and Building's holding in Bayside is down to 40%. This means that Property and Building will need to sell a further tranche of shares within the next few months in order to comply with the provisions of the Concentration Law, which will come into force in mid-December. Last month, Property and Building's parent company Discount Investment attempted to buy out the public's holding in it, but investment house Psagot objected to the move, which therefore failed.
Psagot, which holds 7% of Property and Building, feared that the offer to purchase was intended to make it easier to carry out insider transactions between Property and Building and other companies controlled by Eduardo Elsztain (who controls Discount Investment). At the Discount Investment shareholders' meeting held last Thursday, however, the company's management explained that the aim was to increase the group's indirect exposure to Bayside, and thus maintain its current level of exposure even if Property and Building has to sell a substantial part of its stake, which indeed happened yesterday.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 1, 2019
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