Questions to Indiabulls went unanswered, says SIAS

Singapore

THE board of Indiabulls Properties Investment Trust (IPIT) completely ignored questions about its most recent annual report that were sent to it by the Securities Investors' Association (Singapore) earlier this year, the association said on Thursday.

The retail investors' lobby group, also known as SIAS, said this after a BT Hock Lock Siew column on Aug 15 drew attention to a host of issues that cropped up over the course of IPIT's eight troubled years on the Singapore Exchange mainboard and asked what the bourse and SIAS had to say about all of that.

A subsequent letter from a reader on the same topic also said there was a need to investigate issues such as how the value of IPIT's assets could have collapsed so rapidly and asked for the association's opinion.

Responding to the reader's letter, SIAS president and chief executive David Gerald said in a letter to BT on Thursday that SIAS had published on its website three questions it had for IPIT on June 30 this year. That was before the trust's annual general meeting in July this year, he noted.

SIAS also sent these three questions to the company for a reply, he said, adding: "Regrettably, there has been no response from the board, unlike other listed companies, who have given full attention to the questions posed by SIAS."

The first question involved measures to boost the occupancy rate for IPIT properties, while the second was on whether the board has considered changing IPIT's performance fee structure to better align the trustee-manager's interests with unitholders'.

The third question was directed at IPIT's independent directors, asking them to explain the independent financial adviser's (IFA's) recommendation for the takeover offer. The IFA, Provenance Capital, said in a circular to unitholders in May this year that "the financial terms of the offer are not fair from the perspective of the value of the units but reasonable on other matters".

Noting that IPIT had fallen below the minimum 10 per cent free float threshold, the IFA added that unitholders should accept the offer or try to find a better price on the open market.

Mr Gerald said the IFA's evaluation that the offer was not fair and recommendation that unitholders should accept the offer was "a contradiction" that "does not help minority shareholders in their decision on whether to accept the offer".

IPIT's trustee-manager has responded to the BT column with an announcement clarifying issues raised and which BT reported on Thursday ("Indiabulls trust clarifies issues raised in BT column").

A unit of IPIT's sponsor, real estate developer Indiabulls Real Estate, launched a mandatory cash offer for the trust in April this year at S$0.25 per unit. The counter last traded at S$0.255 before trading was suspended on June 23, after the offer closed with a free float of 3 per cent.