The minimum company value at which the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) is seeking to make an offer for sale to the public for almost one third of its shares is NIS 700 million. This price is almost 30% higher than the NIS 551 value at which four foreign investment funds invested in the TASE.
The TASE is planning to sell the shares to the public in Israel and overseas in the next few weeks, despite a highly contentious and prolonged dispute between its workers and the management. The TASE offering, led by TASE CEO Ittai Ben-Zeev and chairman Amnon Neubach, will be the third largest of the year after Isracard and Altshuler Shaham Provident Funds and Pension, which is slated to complete this week an offer of sale that will make it a public company. If the TASE offering goes through, it will be the final measure in the change of the TASE's ownership structure. The TASE, which formerly operated as a non-profit organization controlled by the local banks, will become a company for purposes of profit listed on the TASE under the control of foreign investment concerns that are not themselves TASE members.
The TASE today published an initial draft prospectus for a "non-uniform offer for sale" to be led by foreign investment bank Jefferies. In effect, a non-uniform offer is similar to building an order book. It gives the party making the offering broader discretion in allocating securities for sale to each party order them and the identity of the party. The offering has an underwriting guarantee of 25% of the securities offered to the public.
Five foreign investors currently hold the TASE: Manikay Partners (19.9%), which is entitled to appoint one director to represent it, and four foreign funds, each of which directly holds 4.69%. 8.2% of the shares in the TASE are held by trustee Moshe Tery. The shares that will now be offered for sale include those held by the trustee, minus 0.3% that will be returned to each of the foreign funds, which will therefore have 4.99% holdings each after the offering. The offer for sale is for 31.7% of the shares in the TASE.
If the TASE managers exercise the options that they have, it will give a 7.8% stake in the TASE. Half of these options were given to Ben-Zeev, and nine others also hold options (Hani Shitrit Bach, Robby Goldenberg, Sraya Orgad, Yehuda van der Walde, Meirav Leshem, Uri Shavit, Orly Grinfeld, Adi Barkan, and Viacheslav Fradin). Assuming full dilution and complete exercise of the options, the managers will hold 0.25-0.6%.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 14, 2019
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