What !^#&49#(@&&? On the sly, without so much as sharing this sensitive financial information with the ASX or even its own shareholders, Origin Energy told its takeover suitors Brookfield and EIG how great its hedge book was doing. What’s the scam with insider trading?
The scam is insider trading is tops if you’re big cheese in the markets. But don’t try it at home; it’s supposed to be illegal. The AFR found it to be pleasing however. “Shareholders would have been pleased” they said because the tax shysters bidding for Origin plonked another half a billion in equity on the table.
Yes, but what about those Origin shareholders who had unwittingly just sold the stock, or those who might have bought some had they known about this intimate detail of Origin’s booming profits? At the final takeover price of $9 a share, said AFR, “there was about $5.6bn in hidden value sitting within Origin that the market failed to value”.
Ahem, the other way to look at it is 1. Brookfield isn’t planning on paying any tax any time so there’s billions in “value” there once it snaffles its prey, 2. Origin’s rosy hedge book was indubitably “hidden value”, truly hidden, and 3. the reason the Origin stock price has so majestically traded below the Brookfield bid price is because competition regulators the ACCC would have to be bonkers to approve this deal and hand over a huge chunk of the national electricity retailing and generation market (which Origin owns) on top of the electricity network assets (distribution and transmission) which Brookfield just bought when the ACCC let it take over AusNet just last year.
What next? ACCC approval for Brookfield and its bankers to drive a truck around Victoria and load up everybody’s wallets and ship them straight to the Caymans?
Josh and Scott deliver Goldman Sachs the giant vampire squid a giant quid
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.