Investor Coast2Coast’s forced sales reach 3% of Ascendis
Ascendis Health’s mainstay investor has been forced to offload about 3% of the company’s total shares in issue to meet obligations to lenders, compounding a precipitous share decline that has made it one of the worst performers on the JSE so far in 2018. A series of stock exchange filings in recent weeks show that parties linked to major shareholder Coast2Coast have had to sell more than 13-million Ascendis shares to meet margin calls and to partly settle convertible debentures, which are debt instruments that can be swapped for equity. Analysts said this suggested Coast2Coast was taking financial strain after it forked out more than R700m less than a year ago to buy 37-million newly issued Ascendis shares at R20 a piece. This was during Ascendis’s rights offer, which was aimed at helping it pay off debts but which received negligible interest from investors. "My sense is Coast2Coast is being quite massively squeezed," one analyst said. Partly due to concerns about Ascendis’s high g...
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