i note that Barclays just put out a notice that showed thir...

i note that Barclays just put out a notice that showed thir holding fell to 36m as of the 17th of March. Well we can safely assume that Barclays sold the 32m+ today and have no AEZ left.

the other question was who sold the other 15m or so shares at $0.29?

So conservatively today someone brought 55m shares in AEZ today, which is around 10% of the units on issue. Within the next 5 days we will know who has brought them.

Now who would have the cash/balls to pull this off? I can only think of 3 possible preditors.

1. Macquarie
2. BNB
3. Private Equity

How likely is it that Macquarie is behind it? Well its not out of the question as they have around $5b in cash on their balance sheet. They could buy all of the assets for lets say $400m ($0.80 per share) hold the assts on their balance sheet, get rid of the current lenders, setup a new finance deal that will hold all of the properties under one facility. Then they repackage it and relist it as the Macquarie European Retail Trust. When they refloat it in say 2-3 yrs they list the NTA at $1 and raise $600m pocketing a cool $200m and get the management fee income once its listed?

How likely that BNB will have a tilt given it has already brought into Rubicon? This is the more likely suitor, they have just raised some more cash, have the friendly arrangements with the Euro banks already. They could refinance the AEZ properties and use a higher LVR (ie get rid of the distress seller tag) package up a few of the Rubicon properties and you then have the Babcock and Brown Euro Property Trust. They would probably flick a few of the AEZ and Rubicon assets and then pick up some of the other assets they want. It makes perfect sense, they can then offload some of the other properties in Europe they have on their balance sheet into the new trust as well.

Likely hood of a private equity bid is preety remote i think, banks would be very unwilling to lend to these guys now.

Thats why BNB and MQG are such bargains at the moment, they are going to have the pick of which assets they want with very little competition.

My money is on BNB becoming the substantial shareholder.

Anyone else got any suggestions?