Wednesday December 19, 2007, 8:50 pmAustralia's second-biggest...

Wednesday December 19, 2007, 8:50 pm

Australia's second-biggest shopping centre owner, Centro Property Group, is trying hard to reassure anxious investors.

Some still think it is headed for liquidation, but Centro is having none of it. Today the property-investment-cum-financial-engineering business issued a reassuring missive to the market.

Centro said there were no clauses or covenants in any of its loans that would trigger a default if its market capitalisation fell.

Since Centro's share price hit a low of 42 cents yesterday, that's a good thing - otherwise the company would already be gone.

The company also says there are plenty of ways it can meet nearly $4 billion in short-term debt that is due by mid-February.

It has raised the prospect of selling interests in managed funds, selling some of its 800 properties, bringing in joint venture partners or raising money by issuing new stock.

Ian Rodgers from business news source The Sheet says that is good news for the banks that lent Centro money but a mixed blessing at best for its existing shareholders.

"What will now happen is that Centro will introduce new equity and joint venture partners as owners of these shopping centre assets in the US and possibly also in Australia, but that will be deleting the ownership stake of those who have Centro shares," he said.

"But I would be pretty confident that the lenders to Centro are all going to get their money back."

No fire sale
Centro chief executive Andrew Scott did not return the ABC's calls today, but financial news service Bloomberg has managed to interview him.

"We announced yesterday that we were undertaking a strategic review over the next eight weeks," he said.

"That would form the basis of any asset sales, equity issuance or other transactions, including the sell-down of some of our managed funds, but that would be expected to be over the following 12 months rather than necessarily in the next eight weeks."

Mr Scott's plans don't include a fire sale.

"We do not need to urgently dispose of assets in accordance with the arrangements we have with our bankers," he said.

It is not immediately clear how selling assets in a year's time will help Centro meet debts that have to be refinanced by mid-February, but it seems there are no shortage of potential buyers.

"We have received approaches in relation to people interested," Mr Scott said.

No doubt Steven Lowy at Westfield and Matthew Quinn at Stockland are hoping to pick up a few bargains. The kind you see in the real estate pages under slogans such as "make an offer" and "owner must sell".

Banks' misplaced confidence
There has been much discussion in recent days about Centro's failure to plainly disclose its debt obligations. But perhaps the biggest puzzle is how Centro and seemingly its bankers were so confident they could roll over short-term debt in the midst of the biggest credit crunch in modern times.

Mr Rodgers says Centro apparently believed finance would be available.

"What is surprising about the Centro presentation on Monday is the slide that suggests that Centro management and presumably their advisers and their lenders believed as recently as last week and potentially as recently as the middle to late of last week, that they, Centro, would be able to refinance these short-term debts in the US banking market and the US capital market the same way that anyone mounting a takeover could expect to do so when the boom was on," he said.

Maybe Centro's management was living on false hope. But what were its lenders thinking? A veritable banking A-list including JP Morgan, the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and Westpac. Mr Rodgers says their behaviour is surprising.

"Now on the basis that Centro did have a favourable advice from their banks, what is curious is that this line-up of four well-informed banks would have all held and shared and maintained the view that the liquidity crisis would have passed by December," he said.

"Then you can only assume that this is representative of the wider institutional view at each of the banks we are talking about and so there has been an air of unreality right around the banking industry about how long the crisis would take to clear."

Now the world of finance is being mugged by reality.