Yahoo Finance Hyflux gets six final offers with one covering retail investors
By Ameya Karve
(Bloomberg) — Crisis-hit Singaporean water-treatment company Hyflux Ltd. has six final offers including one to restructure the entire firm, after an April 30 target for finalising binding term sheets, a person familiar with the matter said.
The restructuring bid is the only offer that takes into account retail investors in Hyflux’s perpetual securities and preference shares, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
About 34,000 individual investors had put money into the once-highflying firm before it stumbled in 2018. Some of them had previously said they don’t expect to recover much of anything from their investments.
The remaining five bids are for specific assets of the company, while some assets attracted no interest at all, the person said, without giving any further details.
Picking a bidder for Hyflux is an urgent task because the company is running out of money after a restructuring process that’s dragged on for nearly three years. It has just enough cash to survive five months from Jan. 31, Bloomberg reported in March. It went under a judicial manager in November last year, extending a long wait for its creditors and the individual investors.
All the offers for Hyflux are from overseas companies and some of them are from suitors who had expressed interest before judicial manager Borrelli Walsh took control, the person said, without naming any bidder. Patrick Bance, a Singapore-based director at Borrelli Walsh, declined to comment.
Borrelli Walsh is seeking to extend its term by 60 more days to July 14, the company said in filing on Monday. The judicial manager had received on Feb. 16 a 90-day extension of its term until May 15 from a Singapore court, according to a document requested from the court by Bloomberg.
Hyflux had earlier said it would finalise binding term sheets with selected investors on or around April 30, while negotiating and executing definitive agreements at a later decided date, according to a filing last month.
© 2021 Bloomberg L.P.
