PrefBlog

Quadravest has announced:

North American Financial 15 Split Corp. (the “Company”) is pleased to announce it will undertake an offering of Preferred Shares and Class A Shares of the Company. The offering will be co-led by National Bank Financial Inc., CIBC, Scotia Capital Inc., RBC Capital Markets and will also include TD Securities Inc., BMO Capital Markets, Canaccord Genuity Corp., Industrial Alliance Securities Inc., Echelon Wealth Partners, GMP Securities L.P., Raymond James, Desjardins Securities Inc., Mackie Research Capital Corporation and Manulife Securities Incorporated.

The Preferred Shares will be offered at a price of $9.90 per Preferred Share to yield 5.6% and the Class A Shares will be offered at a price of $8.80 per Class A Share to yield 13.6%. The closing price on the TSX of each of the Preferred Shares and the Class A Shares on August 7, 2018 was $10.14 and $8.90, respectively.

Since inception of the Company, the aggregate dividends declared on the Preferred Shares have been $7.26 per share and the aggregate dividends declared on the Class A Shares have been $12.15 per share, for a combined total of $19.41. All distributions to date have been made in tax advantage eligible Canadian dividends or capital gains dividends.

The net proceeds of the offering will be used by the Company to invest in an actively managed, high quality portfolio consisting of 15 financial services companies made up of Canadian and U.S. issuers as follows:

Bank of Montreal	National Bank of Canada	Bank of America Corp.
The Bank of Nova Scotia	Manulife Financial Corporation	Citigroup Inc.
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce	Sun Life Financial Services of Canada Inc.	Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Royal Bank of Canada	Great-West Lifeco Inc.	JP Morgan Chase & Co.
The Toronto-Dominion Bank	CI Financial Corp.	Wells Fargo & Co.

The Company’s investment objectives are:
Preferred Shares:
i. to provide holders of the Preferred Shares with fixed, cumulative preferential monthly cash dividends currently in the amount of 5.50% annually, to be set by the Board of Directors annually subject to a minimum of 5.25% until
2019; and
ii. on or about the termination date, currently December 1, 2019 (subject to further 5 year extensions thereafter), to pay the holders of the Preferred Shares $10.00 per Preferred Share.
Class A Shares:
i. to provide holders of the Class A Shares with regular monthly cash dividends in an amount to be determined by the Board of the Directors; and
ii. to permit holders to participate in all growth in the net asset value of the Company above $10 per Unit, by paying holders on or about the termination date of December 1, 2019 (subject to further 5 year extensions thereafter) such amounts as remain in the Company after paying $10 per Preferred Share.

The sales period of this overnight offering will end at 9:00 a.m. EST on August 9, 2018. The offering is expected to close on or about August 16, 2018 and is subject to certain closing conditions including approval by the TSX.

So they’re charging 18.70 per Whole Unit, a hefty 8.2% premium to the 2018-07-31 NAVPU of 17.28. What a nice business it is!

FFN.PR.A last got bigger in October, 2017. It will be recalled that there was a temporary boost in preferred Dividend at the end of September, 2017; there is no current word on whether this boost will be extended.

Update, 2018-8-12: The offering was successful:

North American Financial 15 Split Corp. (the “Company”) is pleased to announce it has completed the overnight marketing of up to 3,363,000 Preferred Shares and up to 3,363,000 Class A Shares of the Company. Total proceeds of the offering are expected to be approximately $62.9 million.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2018 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Issue Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.