Goldway Capital Investment, which has made an off-market offer for SA junior coal miner MC Mining, has acceptances from MCM shareholders representing 83.67% of its issued capital, it said on Monday.
Goldway required acceptances for at least 50.1% or more of the MCM shares as noted in its third supplementary bidder’s statement of March 21. The minimum acceptance condition has been satisfied and the offer is free from all defeating conditions and is now unconditional, it said.
Goldway said it would be extending the offer for 10 business days and it would remain open until 11am SA time on April 22.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission on Friday granted relief to Goldway to extend the period for its offer to April 19 from the original date of April 5.
In February, Goldway offered to buy out the remaining MC Mining shareholders for A$0.16 a share in cash in a deal that, if passed, would result in MC Mining being delisted from all the stock exchanges.
The junior miner has a primary listing in Australia and secondary listings on the JSE and the UK’s Alternative Investment Market.
MC Mining accused the consortium of investors represented by Goldway of presenting misleading information to shareholders to encourage them to accept an offer that its independent board committee has said significantly undervalued the company.
MC Mining has consistently urged minority shareholders to reject the proposal, which requires at least 82.2% of the shares in issue to go through.
On March 25 the company issued a statement saying that since its independent board committee advised shareholders not to accept Goldway’s offer, the consortium had tried to dismiss the findings of independent experts, which assessed the share value before the offer to be between A$0.214 and A$0.356.
Goldway Capital had also, said MC Mining, “falsely claimed that the Vele Aluwani Colliery is under care and maintenance”.
Earlier in March, Vulcan Resources announced a nonbinding proposal to make an off-market cash takeover offer for MC Mining. Vulcan’s proposal was at an indicative price of A$0.17-A$0.20 a share, valuing MC Mining at A$69.34m-A$81.58m (compared with the Goldway offer, which valued the company at about A$65.3m). However, a week later, Vulcan Resources said it was walking away from the deal.
The junior miner relies on the Uitkomst colliery in KwaZulu-Natal for cash generation, but its flagship project is the development of the capital-intensive Makhado project, which would be SA’s only producer of hard coking coal.
The Makhado project has been in the pipeline for the past decade, but MC Mining has been battling to secure funding for it.
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