You should double check all that follows with your financial adviser, but here’s my take on some of the issues that have been raised re the options:
According to the “Listed Options Offer Acceptance Form – CHESS” you can accept the share-for-options-offer for your total holding, OR for any part thereof. Thus, you may elect to accept shares for a proportion of your holding - say half - and retain the rest as options.
I expect if you DON’T return the completed form by the 24th (Thursday), then you are deemed to have elected to retain your TOTAL holding in the form of options.
Just to remind everyone, the option expiry date for the post-consolidation options remains 13 March 2005, however their exercise price is now 20c.
Thus, if you held 100,000 10c exercisable opts (SWTOA’s) before the share consolidation AND YOU DO NOTHING, you will end up holding 50,000 20c exercisable opts when they relist in early July.
Then, on top of that, if you elect to accept the 2:1 options for share offer (BY THURSDAY 24TH JUNE, let me emphasise), you wind up with 25,000 fully paid ordinary shares in lieu of your original 100,000 SWTOA’s.
The choice between the relative merits of opting for 25,000 ordinary shares OR retaining 50,000 20c exercisable March 05 options (for each 100,000 of the old options held) is up to each individual investor.
For my own part, Extralite, I will be accepting the offer. I have a largish holding of options accumulated over a long period, and the attraction of not having to exercise is compelling - notwithstanding that I forego speculative leverage.
For a long while, too, I cycled out of the ordinary shares and into the options, since the latter always traded at a discount assuming a two-for-one exchange rate. My risk (and the reason for the discount) was that the options-for-shares swap may not have been approved by shareholders. However, in the event it was, and by converting I will be completing that stratagem.
On the question of the issue of 10m shares as per the Prospectus, naturally these are post-consolidation shares as they are being issued at 20c.
