Goldway Capital Investment, which has made an offer for SA junior coal miner MC Mining, has acceptances from MCM shareholders representing 90.14% of its issued capital, it said on Monday.
Goldway needs to acquire a relevant interest of 91.08% to be entitled to proceed with compulsory acquisition of the outstanding MCM shares.
MCM Shareholders have until 7pm Sydney time — or 11am SA time — on Monday to accept the offer.
Goldway noted that the acceptances received from MCM shareholders in the week April 15-19 do not reflect any dematerialised acceptances from the JSE as the market’s acceptance deadline for last week is 11am today.
In February, Goldway offered to buy out the remaining MCM 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.
Initially MC Mining urged minority shareholders to reject the proposal, but on April 10 its independent board committee advised shareholders to consider accepting the offer.
Taking into account the fact that the offer has now been declared unconditional and control of MC Mining will pass to Goldway and its associates, the board believes shareholders should consider accepting the offer, it said in a statement on April 10.
The board cited the limited liquidity in the trading of MC Mining’s shares and its view that there is no likelihood of an alternative bid or competing proposal on more favourable terms arising in the near term.
In March, Vulcan Resources announced a nonbinding proposal to make an off-market cash takeover offer for MCM. 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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