UE's offer for WBL: Raw deal for minorities?

Singapore

ON the surface, the opportunity for United Engineers (UE) to pay S$174 million for a 29.9 per cent stake in WBL Corp presently held by OCBC, its founding Lee family and the Yanlord Perennial Investment (YPI) consortium looks like a bargain.

But for UE's minority shareholders who baulked last year when OCBC sold its UE stake to YPI at a fat discount to the market price, this second-act reveal could make them feel like they've been dragged along for a trip that they didn't ask for.

To recap, OCBC's Lee family had been soliciting bidders for its shares in UE and WBL for a long time, and their terms were that UE and WBL had to…