There is a difference bewteen offering a "price" and negotiating a price behind the scenes and making public statememts about that price in the market place.
There is nothing wrong with trying it on, but there is something wrong with making statements like the offer is "fair and sensible".
The words "fair and sensible" seem to me to be a crafted play on the commonly used term "fair and reasonable" which has the abilty to mislead investors into thinking the offer is fair and reasonable.
Under trade practices law if a vendor of, say a unit, publishes a pamphlet showing the units floor area to be larger than it actually is and a purchaser relies on the information in the pamphlet to purchase the unit, that alone can represent a cause of action under the trade practices law for misleading and deceptive conduct and that is whether or not the erroneous information in pamphlet was falsified on purpose or just got published in error. You don't need intent to mislead under the trade practices law, you only need to have mislead someone.
Now what does the term fair and sensible actually mean?
Does it mean that NST have an expert valuation that says that a 49% share in the EKJV can be fairly valued at $150 million? if they don't their comments as misleading IMO and if they do, wouldn't their own shareholders be interested to know that the company has information that fairly values their own 51% interest in the EKJV at $156 million.
If their comments are to be believed the pro rata value that the EKJV contributes to NST's market capitalisation of about over $1 billion is a significant overvaluation, ie the market is overvaluing the asset by about $850 million. I wonder how much the market is overvaluing some of NST's other assets by? Rhetorical question. The US banksters and markets are capable of dialing up almost any number they choose, you've only got to look at the value of companies like Amazon etc. Esh
