LONDON (Reuters) – Lloyds Banking Group said on Monday take-up for its record 13.5 billion-pound ($21.9 billion) rights issue totaled over 95 percent, drawing a line under a turbulent few months for Britain’s largest retail lender.
Lloyd’s cash call — the world’s largest to date — is a key plank of its bumper capital raising effort launched last month to enable the bailed-out bank to avoid a state-backed insurance scheme for bad debts.
A high take-up is the strongest indication yet of shareholder support for its turnaround efforts.
“I take it as a good sign. Over 95 percent feels quite good to me,” analyst Mike Trippitt at Oriel Securities said.
“This has drawn a line under the capital issue — they have a solid capital position, a strong balance sheet. The spotlight now will be on the operating performance.”
Lloyds shares opened up over 3 percent and jumped over 5 percent in early trade, as investors were cheered by the take-up and by Abu Dhabi’s $10 billion bailout for Dubai, where Lloyds is a creditor. At 0830 GMT (3:30 a.m. EST) the stock was up 2.1 percent at 57.41p.
In a statement on Monday Lloyds said around 95.3 percent of new shares offered were taken up by investors.
That will leave just over 600 million pounds of shares to be placed by its underwriters, Bank of America Merill Lynch, UBS and Citigroup — considerably better than Lloyds’ last rights offer in June, which left 13.1 percent to be placed by its bankers.
Lloyds, 43 percent owned by the UK government, declined to comment on when the remaining shares could be placed, but sources close to the situation had said last week that a “single digit” rump could be placed on the market within hours.
The bank, which has an army of 2.8 million small shareholders accounting for roughly 7 percent of its equity, has faced anger over mistakes made during the crisis and a decision to buy embattled rival HBOS, heightened by revelations that the Bank of England had secretly lent HBOS 25 billion pounds to keep it afloat at the height of the crunch.
But investors voted overwhelmingly last month to back its capital-raising plan, which includes a debt exchange into so-called contingent capital, and totals over 23 billion pounds after an increase announced on Friday.
The new bonds, dubbed “cocos”, are designed to convert into equity if Lloyds’ core Tier 1 capital ratio falls below 5 percent, shoring up its position if it hits rocky times.
The rights issue had been priced at 37p per share, with investors being offered 1.34 shares for every existing share held. That compares with Friday’s close at 56.2 p.
($1=.6156 pounds)
(Reporting by Clara Ferreira-Marques; Editing by David Holmes and Greg Mahlich)
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