And it’s not obvious what is up at AMTD:
Things get more complicated though. Before the Digital IPO there was some shuffling of assets between the three AMTD companies. Nothing unusual in that, get the right assets that you want to float into the company you’re about to float. But a similar asset shuffle after the float is much more unusual. And yet that’s what has been done. Hotel assets have been moved from AMTD Group into AMTD Digital via AMTD IDEA. Half a billion’s worth in fact, although net of debt and so on it’s around $250 million US.
Now, if you’ve a soaring share price then a very useful thing to do is offer some of your very highly valued shares for real assets. This is what Steve Case did when buying Time Warner with AOL stock. One of the deals of the century that was. Not so good for Time Warner shareholders but still.
What AMTD seems to have done is use the very highly valued shares of HKD – recall, the newly floated AMTD Digital – to buy assets from AMTD Group, that parent and unquoted company. Which is really very odd indeed. Because they even used valuations of stock along the line that were higher than market prices to do this.
Might be nice to gamble upon but not what should be considered as an investment perhaps…..
I suspect the market values of the hotels would be a bit lower than they’ve been valued at. At least the Asian ones, no idea about Canada.
But that doesn’t really matter, I guess? The people who control AMTD now own a slightly smaller stake in these hotels than they did a few months ago, a process which will have incurred considerable expense.
And what is the point of a fintech company owning real estate anyway?
The bloke who runs AMTD seems to have form as a dodgy operator and is a noisy supporter of the PRC and National Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
That was a long-winded way of saying there’s evidently something dodgy here but I don’t know what.
Serious question; aren’t regulators meant to investigate suspicious share price movements? Or do they just shrug and say: “meme stock” these days?