Elliott Associates launched bids for four different Italian REIFs two months ago, and so far they haven’t been very successful in acquiring shares. They managed to acquire 16% of the shares of the Polis fund, but another hedge fund overbid them on the Mediolanum Real Estate Fund and apparently there was little interest from Fondo Alpha and Immobiliare Dinamico shareholders to tender their shares. As a result Elliott Associates decided to increase their bid for those two funds. They raised the offer for Fondo Alpha by 12.4% from €1156.25 to €1300.00 and the offer for Immobiliare Dinamico was increased by 12.5% from €69.31 to €78.00. I didn’t tender my shares in the previous offers, and I don’t intent to tender them in the new offers, but I do find it very encouraging to see the large interest from hedge funds in Italian REIFs. I bought them last year and no-one was interested, and now everybody tries to get a piece of the action:
Disclosure
Author is long Fondo Alpha and Immobiliare Dinamico
Didn’t you forget to include the latest 65EUR bid on QFDI in the table? 😉
Nope, see last entry
Right – I must be getting blind – my mistake.
How do you keep up with the news from the funds? Do you have some sort of alert system?
It’s not easy with the Italian funds. I track changes to the official website of the various funds using changedetection.com and IB shows when there is news from reuters. And sometimes I have to Google when I see big changes in a price…
Hi are the other non-Elliott offers as well contingent on reaching a minimum threshold of shares outstanding?
Cheers
I assume so, but haven’t been able to read all the offers. But I think the offerer can waive this condition if they want, Elliott for example acquired a 16% stake in Polis so they were happy with what they got I guess.
At least Elliott Associates appears to have the decency to not let the EUR1156 offer go through, but to let all share holders have the chance to join the EUR 1300 offer instead (also the ones who were silly enough to sign up for tendering in the EUR 1156 offer)
I suspect that they most likely got a very low amount people tendering, and launching a completely new tender offer would take more time and would incur more costs. I would bet that Elliott Associates is just trying to make as much money as possible, and appearing decent is just a side-effect.
Haha I bet you are spot on :o) Or the explanation could be that they really do insist that they want >50% or nothing, so that a <50% position was unattractive to them even at EUR 1156…
Does anyone know if QFAL ended up buying any shares at EUR 1300 of if there was still tendered too few?