Ann: Update of put option, page-25

• Aug 14 2017 at 5:22 PM
  

Quintis gets an important reprieve
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Adam Gilchrist and Daniel Ricciardo are brand ambassadors for Quintis, which needs to recapitalise. Supplied
by Julie-anne Sprague
Struggling Indian sandalwood plantation group Quintis has secured important breathing room after a key institutional investor agreed not to exercise a put option, which could have forced the company into administration.

After being rolled several times in the past few months, an affiliate of hedge fund and plantation investor Davidson Kempner has decided not to exercise a $34 million put option.

The option was granted after Asia Pacific Investments invested in 400 hectares of trees in 2014. For years it was just a footnote in the company's annual accounts. But it emerged this year that the put option threatened to tip the company into administration without a cash injection.

Quintis said on Monday the option, which could have been exercised between August 9 and August 11, had not been exercised.


Asia Pacific Investments has another put option that can be exercised between December 11 and December 15.


Quintis shares have not traded since May. The Perth-based company is in a desperate bid to deliver a recapitalisation strategy. It is tangled in a web of liabilities and competing interests: shareholders, bondholders, and plantation investors are all vying to protect their capital.

The company has already averted outright default once; the company obtained a waiver from bondholders that got it out of its reporting requirements when it failed to lodge accounts on time.

Quintis, which was once known as TFS, is also in a legal dispute with its former managing director Frank Wilson over an $11.1 million loan.

Mr Wilson, who is also one of the company's biggest individual growers, resigned in March.