spin doctors

That flea bitten dog Oly seems to have picked up some of Tony Blair's spin doctors as well as its fleas. According to OLY,a holder of renounced rights is a shareholder... you do not have to be a shareholder to hold rights under a renounceable rights issue. So whereas OLY says that 24.27m shareholders took up their shares, this is somewhat(?) misleading. There were 6.345m rights traded which assuming they all exercised meant that the number of shareholders that took up shares was only around 17.9m a bit over 50% . Tony Blair would be inspired by such liberal treatment of the truth. So now the underwriters are sitting with 8m shares and those who came through the rights issue are unlikely to be long term holders. The share price has already started to head further south with more to come as they arbitrage the oppies and the heads to squeeze a bit of margin and flee.
What this missive doesn't say is that with the volumes of trades and the sell down of rights many of the long-suffering shareholders have fled the register or just chucked their holding statements in the bottom drawer in dispair to await the inevitable clean-out and blood letting to come. Bring it on Bozos.