RHG board recommends offer
The board of RHG has recommended that shareholders accept an offer for all the shares in the company from a syndicate made up of lender Resimac Ltd and the Australian Mortgage Acquisition Company.The syndicate is offering cash of 44.1 cents a share. The total value of the offer is A$136 million. RHG will also pay a fully franked dividend of three cents a share.RHG's closing price on Friday was 40 cents and its average price over the 30 days to July 5 was 39.7 cents. The offer price (plus dividend) exceeds RHG's highest share price over the past two years.La Trobe Financial had also been in discussions with the RHG board and had got as far as putting acquisition funding in place before RHG opted to go with the Resimac and AMAC offer.RHG manages the remains of the Rams Home Loans' mortgage portfolio. It was closed in 2008 and has been in run-off ever since.RHG made a net profit of $16.1 million for the six months to December. The company's mortgage book ran down from $2.8 billion in June last year to $2.4 billion in December. At December, it had $1.7 billion of warehouse funding facilities and $656 million of mortgage-backed securities on issue.The bidding syndicate has been set up so that AMAC will buy RHG's shares and on-sell the mortgage assets to Resimac. AMAC will take responsibility for winding up the RHG corporate group.AMAC was established recently by a former RHG director, Trevor Loewensohn.Resimac's executive director, Mary Ploughman, said in an earlier statement: "Given that RHG is operating in wind-down mode, a key requirement of the RHG board was that the transaction result in an offer for the company's shares rather than a purchase of the assets."AMAC will assist in facilitating this outcome."Ploughman said yesterday that the acquisition would provide efficiencies for Resimac. "We are adding a couple of billion dollars to our portfolio without having to replicate all the work on the assets."Resimac should be able to refinance RHG's warehouse funding arrangements at a lower cost. And it has the opportunity to turn RHG's borrowers into Resimac customers.