Posted by By Sun News Publishing on
Just released results of Fidelity Bank's recently concluded Public Offer reveals the bank has absorbed 93.5 percent or N100bn out of the N107bn subscription money, pushing its total shareholders' Fund to N129bn or US$1.1bn.
•Public Offer gives 99.4% applicants full allotment
Just released results of Fidelity Bank's recently concluded Public Offer reveals the bank has absorbed 93.5 percent or N100bn out of the N107bn subscription money, pushing its total shareholders' Fund to N129bn or US$1.1bn.
A close examination of the results reveals that 99.4 percent of the applications for subscription received full allotment, no applicant received less than 76.6 percent of units applied for, while 0.6 percent of total applications received minimal rejection.
Meanwhile Fidelity's Public Offer had received an overall subscription of about 223 percent. The result also gave the bank over $250 million in dollar capital with the GDR component of the Offer also recording a 101 percent success rate.
Fidelity Bank had in September 2007 offered a total of 5,501,100,421 ordinary shares of 50 kobo each at N8.00 per share. Results indicate that a total of 12,836,745,322 ordinary shares were received in connection with the offer while 101 applications for 2, 172, 375 ordinary shares were rejected for non-compliance with the terms of the Offer.
Similarly, the application for 3,774, 264,507 ordinary shares under the GDR was considered as an application under preferential allotment while the balance of 301,343 application forms for 9, 060, 308, 440 ordinary shares were considered as applications from the general public.
With the success of the offer and the quantum leap in shareholders fund to over US$1billion, there are possibilities that the bank might soon be in a position to manage Nigeria's external reserve independently. It will be recalled that Fidelity is one of the banks mandated by the Central Bank of Nigeria to manage Nigeria's external reserve in alliance with Investec of South Africa.
Feelers from Fidelity indicate that both Board and Management of the bank are quite excited about the high success rate of the Offer which they believe has offered the bank huge headroom to implement its ambitious growth plan.