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ISCOVER
Resimac and Pepper Australia last week locked horns in a fight for the former RAMS loan book, RHG.
Early last week, Pepper Australia lodged a revised proposal for the acquisition of RHG, which offered one cent per share more than Resimac's previous offer.
Despite the largest institutional shareholder of RHG, Cadence Capital Limited, backing the Pepper proposal, Resimac hit back, claiming other shareholders preferred their offer.
“The revised Pepper proposal remains highly conditional and favours Cadence on both terms and benefits,” Resimac claimed.
“The Resimac offer consideration is 100 per cent cash available to all RHG shareholders which will likely be delivered up to two months earlier than under the revised Pepper proposal.”
Resimac also claimed the ultimate value of the Pepper offer to RHG shareholders is uncertain.
Late last week, however, Pepper’s group managing director and CEO, Patrick Tuttle, hit back at Resimac, labelling the comments as “highly speculative” and “subjective”.
“Their comments around the purported preferentiality, conditionality and uncertainty of our bid are entirely self-serving,” Mr Tuttle said.
“Whilst we acknowledge the clear differences between our proposal to acquire RHG and the competing all-cash offer made by the Resimac syndicate, it is preposterous to suggest that our cash and scrip offer is simply inferior by definition, unless of course they are asserting that ASX-listed shares in the form of Cadence stock have no economic value.
“This is a convenient and, at best, simplistic argument.”
Mr Tuttle remains certain that his company has presented RHG’s shareholders with a highly credible proposition, which values RHG at 50.9 cents per share based on yesterday’s Cadence Capital Limited closing price.
This compares to the lower all-cash bid of 49.5 cents per share offered by Resimac.
While the battle intensifies in Australia, Pepper has shown its commitment to expanding operations overseas after acquiring Oakwood Global Finance last week, one of the UK's highest rated independent residential mortgage special servicers.
