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(Singapore)
ANTHONY Soh could receive millions of dollars from ANZ
Bank and Merrill Lynch after he and 80 other investors voted yesterday in
Melbourne to accept a A$253 million (S$297 million) settlement of their claims
against the two banks.
The scheme should return about 37 cents of every dollar claimed if an Australian court approves the deal in August. In return, lawsuits filed against the banks will be dropped.
The development should resolve at least one aspect of the convoluted Jade Technologies takeover saga which last year landed Dr Soh, its former group president, in hot water with the authorities here. He is also facing a lawsuit and a police investigation.
Last June, Dr Soh sued Merrill Lynch and Opes Prime, an Australian brokerage, for their part in scuttling a S$117 million takeover offer for Catalist-listed Jade. He had pledged 300 million shares in Jade - about two-thirds of his holdings then - to Opes to fund the February 2008 takeover bid, but most of his Jade shares were seized by Merrill Lynch when Opes collapsed the next month.
Merrill was a secured creditor of Opes and promptly sold about 95 million shares. About 1,200 clients similarly lost shares worth about A$585 million that they had placed with Opes in return for margin loans. Opes had on-lent the shares from its clients to the secured creditors, but Opes clients wrongly believed that they had retained ownership of the shares.
Dr Soh was claiming a total of A$30.4 million, according to documents released by the receivers, which means he could get back up to A$11.2 million, although the final amount will be decided later by the receivers. Reports from Australia say the money could be paid out before Christmas.
Dr Soh's lawyer, Michael Khoo, Senior Counsel, told BT yesterday that the arrangement was consistent with Dr Soh's belief all along that he had not lost beneficial ownership in the Jade shares.
For his part in the Jade debacle, Dr Soh was censured last October by the Securities Industry Council (SIC) for 'multiple and serious breaches of the code' on takeovers and mergers. Investors had been left high and dry when Dr Soh was forced to withdraw his offer once his shares were seized. The SIC said he was 'far too casual' in approaching his obligations as an offeror and also said it considered him unsuitable to be a director of a Singapore-listed company for five years.
OCBC, his financial adviser on the Jade takeover, as well as an Allen & Gledhill partner, were also rapped by the SIC. OCBC called in the Commercial Affairs Department last April and later sued Dr Soh for allegedly misleading it into acting for him and said that he had had 'no intention of making a genuine takeover of Jade'.
OCBC said that Dr Soh had given it a fake bank document proving he had US$100 million to fund the bid and alleged that he had not disclosed to his advisers the fact that much of his stake had been pledged away.
Dr Soh counter-sued, saying that when OCBC quit as his financial adviser he had no choice but to back out of the bid. He said that the bank later took advantage of inside knowledge by quickly selling 101 million Jade shares in the open market, a claim OCBC is denying.
Dr Soh was in Melbourne yesterday and voted for the arrangement but many other creditors opposed it. One read aloud a letter from the wife of a fellow Opes creditor who later killed himself, Australian media said.
'I'll never forget the look on (the creditor's) ashen face when he got the phone call and we'd lost all our shares and money,' the wife wrote. Some months later, she 'returned home to find he had hanged himself in our backyard while our (then) three-year-old son was crying at the back door'.
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