It looks like the covering was done through the issue of the...

It looks like the covering was done through the issue of the placement shares (highlighted in green).

Basically we had a long term short positions of 3.4m shares which I believe is mostly from Morgan Stanley. A big chunk of this was put on around $1.30-1.60 from memory (could have been a bit lower). It looks like almost all of this has been covered from placement shares issued on the 6th. We also had ~4m new shorts added after the CR was announced but before the shares were issued (highlighted in yellow). These shorts were also covered by the placement shares. If you look at the broker data for the 6th it was pretty much impossible that the shorts were covered by trading on market because the short positions would have to have been distributed across so many brokers and taken up 60% of trade. If the covering was done on market it is also likely that it would have pushed up the price like you said, so the placement shares seems much more likely as the source of the short covering. There might have been some on market covering but it would have been a relatively small proportion.


At this stage it seems highly likely that this is not a reporting error and that the shorts (both long term and short term) have indeed been closed. We might need to wait one or two more days for absolute confirmation but the reporting errors I've seen are usually resolved in 1-2 days after the event.