Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services Inc. has announced:
that it has sent today to all shareholders of its Non-Cumulative 5-Year Rate Reset Class A Preferred Shares Series G (the “Series G Preferred Shares”) a formal notice and instructions for the redemption of the Series G Preferred Shares outstanding as of today. Upon the Series G Redemption scheduled for June 30, 2022, iA Insurance will pay to the holders of the Series G Preferred Shares the redemption price of $25 less any taxes required to be withheld or deducted. There are 10,000,000 Series G Preferred Shares outstanding as of today.
Separately from the redemption price, the final quarterly dividend of $0.2360625 per Series G Preferred Share will be paid in the usual manner on June 30, 2022 to shareholders of record on May 27, 2022. After the Series G Preferred Shares are redeemed, holders of Series G Preferred Shares will cease to be entitled to distributions of dividends and will not be entitled to exercise any rights as holders other than to receive the redemption price and the final quarterly dividend described above.
IAF.PR.G arose via ticker change from IAG.PR.G in January 2019. IAG.PR.G was issued as a FixedReset, 4.30%+285, that commenced trading 2012-6-1 after being announced 2012-5-24. Unusually, the issue was re-opened shortly afterwards. IAG.PR.G reset at 3.777% in 2017; I recommended against conversion; and there was no conversion, although getting official confirmation of this was like pulling teeth.
The issue has been tracked by HIMIPref™ and assigned to the FixedReset (Discount) subindex.
The redemption notice came as a surprise to the markets; the issue traded up $1.03 to 25.18, which isn’t a bad day’s work; its sister issue, IAF.PR.I, was up a similar amount; this follows similar jumps on the ENB.PR.U redemption announcement. The Straight Perpetual, IAF.PR.B, was up only about 1.10% today, though, so the market’s largesse was not indiscriminate!
Thanks to Assiduous Reader niagara for bringing this to my attention!
In light of the LRCN that purportedly replaces this issue, the 250 million dollar question is, why?
This issue would have reset at 2.85+2.6x or something similar for a total cost of say 5.6%. Or pretax about 7.3% after accounting for the approximate 1.315 multiplication factor.
The delta vs the new issue would be .754%(7.364-6.61)
Considering 3% cost of underwriting, and the fact that the LRCN also resets at 4% plus GoC5, the whole exercise was for .754×5-3% or about 75 bps savings over 5 years. So much hassle to save about 2.5 million? May be my math is off. Or perhaps the effective tax rate for iA group is higher.
Or perhaps the issuer is really committed to saving pennies.
What am I missing here?
Not the same issuer. The LRCN is issued by the holding company while the pref was issued by the regulated Insurance company.
I thought that was changed back in 2019.
https://prefblog.com/?p=37890
newbiepref has it right; IAF is the symbol for the operating company that issued the outstanding preferreds (see https://ia.ca/-/media/files/ia/investisseurs/rapportsfinanciers/annuel/2022/industrielle-alliance-assurance-et-services-financiers/q4-2021-iaifs-annual-information-form-v2.pdf ), while IAG is the symbol for the holding company that has just issued the LRCNs (see https://ia.ca/newsroom/2022/may/iafg-announces-offering-of-250-million-limited-recourse-capital-notes ).
See also the prospectus at SEDAR, “iA Financial Corporation Inc. May 25 2022 22:57:23 ET Prospectus (non pricing) supplement (other than ATM) – English PDF 326 K”
Thanks for the clarification guys.
[…] is the equivalent of a dividend paying FixedReset, 5.085%+308. That’s a wider spread than the recently redeemed IAF.PR.G, which had been scheduled to reset at +285; but on the other hand it moves the liability to higher […]