Jim - my take is that no money will have changed hands when the...

Jim - my take is that no money will have changed hands when the new shares were issued to ML, acting in its capacity as nominee of the various beneficial owners (see Nick's post). The accounting entries will have been: (A) credit: share capital (nominal value of new shares issued) and (B) share premium account (difference between A & C) and (C) debit (ie reduce): loans due to senior lenders (ie the beneficial owners of the new shares issued).

There will have been no requirement for ML (or anyone else) to hold the shares as nominee for the beneficial owners. My guess is that the individual lenders (ie beneficial owners of the new shares) prefer to appear as a 'single' owner of the stock. No-one truly knows what their intentions are moving forward, except to the extent the directors have made statements setting out the situation they have been told to present. It seems likely to me that agreements will have been entered into between the beneficial owners of the new shares recently issued, setting out what will happen in the event of a holder wishing to dispose of (or perhaps add to) its existing holding. Holding all the shares under the ML umbrella technically makes ML a single holder, so the usual 'companies act' rules won't apply to holders within the 'group'.

A simple analogy might be shares owned by a married couple, where the shares are registered in the husband's name. The couple are free to agree between themselves to vary the beneficial ownership from (for instance) 50% each to some other percentage without changing the registered ownership.

The latter example is a silly one to have chosen because everyone knows that wives own everything in a marriage (except debts or other onerous obligations) regardless of what any deluded and/or hen-pecked husband might think.

It's an unfair world. Then you die.