bell potter benefiting from the hepc gold rush, page-7

I like the report and I suggest some of its "potential" is conservative but thats the nature of it I guess. Its just nice to have the coverage.

It was this little bit in the fine print that caught my attention:

"Disclosure: Bell Potter Securities acted as partial
underwriter in the recent exercise of the December 2011 BITO listed options and received fees for that service".

Ummm, I read on numerous occassions in BIT announcements that there was no underwriting agreement in place for the options. In fact the announcement dated Nov 30, ie only days before the options expiry contained the following advice to shareholders: "There is no underwriting agreement currently in place in relation to the Options".

That seemed pretty clear and unambiguous. Now BP tell us that they underwrote the thing. Odd. Maybe an agreement was put in place during the final days before expiry, ie after the Nov announcement saying that there was no underwriting in place. So I look at the company's price sentitive announcement on Jan 6th which advises us that:

"The Directors are pleased to advise that a total of 79,865,226 30 December 2011 options, each exercisable to acquire one fully paid ordinary share at $0.10 per share have been exercised by the option holders".

Note "have been exercised by the option holders" doesn't include underwriting as the underwriter isn't an options holder. So I'm left wondering, since the company advised that there wasn't an underwriter and advised that the $8mil was raised from the exercise by "options holders", what was underwritten by Bell Potter as per their declaration herein ?

If Bell actually underwrote some of the options included in the $8mil raised and its standard practice for the underwriter to look to offload that stock subsequently, wouldn't that the fact that the underwriter was in possession of such stock be material information for shareholders ?

Was that stock dumped recently ?
How much stock did they hold ?

As the options accounted for an increase in stock on issue of well in excess of 50%, Bell would only have had to underwrite ~14% of it, ie $1.15mil to have a substancial shareholding, ie 5% of the company yet we never saw a substancial shareholder notice filed which is of course a legal obligation.

So I'm left wondering what exactly Bell underwrote. Why were we never told, or rather told otherwise and are they still in posession of the stock. It could be that they passed the stock straight onto multiple clients thus avoiding holding the stock themselves and therefore triggering the substancial shareholder rule but it just seems odd that we were lead to believe there was no underwriting and now Bell tells us that there was.

Is it just me that thinks this is strange ? And why the hell won't they give us an updated top 20 so that we know where things stand after the register went from 150m shares to 230 mil post options exercise ?

this isn't an accusation but I really do wish they could be a little more transparent and communicative.