In QuotedData’s morning briefing 12 April 2022:
- Diverse Income Trust is asking shareholders whether they want to take advantage of its annual share redemption facility. However, as the announcement points out, the discount is already narrow. Shareholders have until 3 May 2022 to submit redemption requests. Cash would hit accounts on 16 June or thereabouts.
- Scottish American Investment Company has redeemed all of its remaining 2022 debenture stock. The debenture paid interest (bore a coupon) of 8%. It had reached its scheduled maturity date. As previously announced, the company had earlier agreed to refinance its long term borrowings with £80m of long-term private placement debt. This refinancing has now been completed and the ongoing borrowing cost of the debt, including this £80m and the additional £15m of private placement debt which was raised last year, is now just below 3% a year. The long-term hit to the company from borrowing at 8% over a long period of time was considerable. There have been worse examples across the sector, however.
- Syncona has drawn attention to Anaveon AG‘s first clinical data from its ongoing Phase I/II study of its lead programme, ANV419. This was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2022, taking place 8-13 April 2022 in New Orleans. 16 patients across 7 dosing cohorts with different types of progressing cancer had received ANV419. ANV419 was shown to be very well-tolerated, with highly favourable safety data, robust and consistent pharmacodynamic effects, and excellent selectivity for inducing proliferation of relevant immune effector cells. Based on the highly encouraging data, a Phase II study of ANV419 has been initiated in multiple tumour types, including melanoma, to evaluate how effective it is both as a single treatment and in combination with other therapies.
- JPEL Private Equity Limited says that the partial mandatory redemption of its US$ Equity Share class announced on 4 April 2022 has been completed with the redemption of 9,729,645 shares. The shares were redeemed on 11 April 2022 at $1.85 per share and cancelled.
We also have news of an acquisition by Hg Capital Trust.