Actually yes. Let me break it down for you as a practitoner of the dark art. Start with 100 shares long...
Under (a) you might sell 50. Your custodian will deliver 50 shares to the buyer and you'll get whatever $ in your bank account 2 days after you trade.
Under (c), you arrange to borrow 50 shares from a lending agent (who acts on behalf of an asset owner, the lender). Once confirmed, you can go as sell 50 shares, which your broker will tag as short. The day after you trade, the lending agent will transfer 50 shares to your custodian and you will deliver some collateral to the lending agent, cash or some other stock you own. Typically, you can expect to lodge $1.05 cash for every $worth of stock borrowed, or $1.15 worth of stock for the same thing. At the second day after you've sold (shorted), your custodian will deliver 50 shares to the buyer and you get the proceeds from the sale. Your number of votes remains 100 and you're obliged to report 50 shares short position to Asic. Your economic exposure here is net 50 long but you have 100 votes at your custodian.
However, although your number of votes remains 100, substantial holdings disclosures are broader than number of votes. Economic or indirect interests are within scope of the disclosure regime, particularly when the exposure is substantially identical (no pun). It also means that substantial holder notices can, in theory, add up to more than 100%. For a quite different example of double counting of substantials, see disclosures by Greencape Capital, an associate of Challenger Group, which lodges its own form contemporaneously.
In relation to the World Mining Fund, by far the dominant holder in BLK, which you can tell from its annual report, in conjuction with its substantial holder notices, it is a long only fund. There are long/short funds managed by that company, but the main holder is not one of them.
If you do this kind of thing for a living, it's easy to forget that most people don't know the mechanics, which i hope this demystifies.
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