PrefBlog

National Bank has announced:

that it intends to make an offer to purchase (the “Offers”) all of the issued and outstanding Non-Cumulative 5-Year Rate Reset First Preferred Shares Series 21 (the “Preferred Shares Series 21”), all of the issued and outstanding Non-Cumulative 5-Year Rate Reset First Preferred Shares Series 24 (the “Preferred Shares Series 24”), and all of the issued and outstanding Non-Cumulative 5-Year Rate Reset First Preferred Shares Series 26 (the “Preferred Shares Series 26”, and together with the Preferred Shares Series 21 and the Preferred Shares Series 24, the “Preferred Shares”).

Holders of the Preferred Shares (the “Shareholders”) will have the opportunity to tender all or a portion of their Preferred Shares for the applicable purchase price payable in cash. The purchase price for each of the Preferred Shares is as follows:

(i) $26.81 per Preferred Share Series 21, representing a 2.8% premium over the February 23, 2011 closing price;

ii) $28.03 per Preferred Share Series 24, representing a 2.5% premium over the February 23, 2011 closing price;

(iii) $28.03 per Preferred Share Series 26, representing a 2.4% premium over the February 23, 2011 closing price.

In addition, Shareholders of record as of April 8, 2011 (including Shareholders who tender their Preferred Shares under the Offers) will also be entitled to the regularly scheduled dividend payment on May 15, 2011.

The Bank believes that the Offers provide an opportunity for holders of Preferred Shares to realize all or a portion of their investment at a premium to the market prior to the announcement of the Offers. The Bank also believes that the Offers represent an appropriate use of its available cash and is part of prudent capital management practice by the Bank in accordance with its capital plan to meet regulatory requirements.

The take up of the Preferred Shares tendered pursuant to the Offers will be financed from the Bank’s existing cash reserves. Preferred Shares acquired pursuant to the Offers will be cancelled. The Offers are not subject to any minimum number of Preferred Shares being deposited but are subject to customary conditions, including obtaining all regulatory approvals required.

Shareholders can tender their Preferred Shares in accordance with the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Offers to be contained in an issuer bid circular which will be filed with applicable Canadian securities regulators and mailed to Shareholders. The Bank expects to mail the circular on or about March 4, 2011. The Bank advises its Shareholders to read the circular when it is available, as it contains important information. The circular will also be available at www.sedar.com.

Computershare Investor Services Inc. will serve as the depositary. It is expected that the Offers will expire at 5:00 p.m. (Montréal time) on April 11, 2011 or at such later time and date to which the Offers may be extended by the Bank.

Well, you can’t tell your players without a programme!

I realize that as a financial professional, I am at this point expected to stroke my beard wisely and murmer that I was expecting this …. but, I confess, this has got me flummoxed. The bid is extraordinarily rich , as shown by the yields to call (calculated as of the expiration date, April 11, at the Offer Price, to the first par call, holders at that point not getting the May dividend (the estimated ex-Dividend date is April 5, and the offer is quite clear that those who tender will get the dividend.

Clearly, given the yields to par call, holders should tender. The Issuer Bid is clearly related to the issues’ eventual loss of Tier 1 status. But questions remain: what’s the rush? and what about their straight perpetuals, NA.PR.K, NA.PR.L and NA.PR.M ?

Update: Note that an error in the yield in the table in the original posting has now been corrected. Thanks to Assiduous Reader MC for alerting me.

Update: OK, I’ve come up with two possible rationales, neither of which I find particularly convincing:

1) They have, and expect to have, way more capital than necessary and also have a lot more available cash than they can profitably deploy, currently sitting in Money Market. They are therefore quite happy to swap their money market instruments, yielding 1%+ as interest, for FixedResets yielding about 2% dividend.

2) They have decided to try to issue a FixedReset with an NVCC clause at a very low coupon/reset in the second half of April. They are therefore trying to get everybody feeling happy about their wonderful NA preferred share investment.

Updated, 2011-2-25: Assiduous Reader blue notes a better reason in the comments. The webcast conference call disclosed that the premium will be a direct hit to retained earnings, bypassing the P&L statement, and the gross preferred dividends saved will be paid out as common dividends.

Update, 2011-2-25, Later: It seems to me that there is a strong possibility that this is accounting gimmickry that is ultimately deleterious to the best interests of the common shareholders. Their 2010 Annual Report discloses an effective tax rate of 16.7% in 2010 compared to 21.7% in 2009. If we estimate the effective tax rate at 20% going forward, then the 2.7% pre-tax financing cost disclosed in conference calls becomes 2.16% after tax; compared to the 1.98% they are saving by buying the preferreds at the given prices.

There are a lot of moving parts to this simple calculation, though (marginal tax rate? tax effect of buying at a premium out of retained earnings?) and I’m certainly not an expert on bank taxation. Further comment are welcome.

Update, 2011-2-28: National Bank Investor Relations states in an eMail:

For information purpose our average statutory tax rate is approximatly 30%. The effective tax rate is affected by non taxable revenues such as dividends from Canadian corporations. To analyse the after tax cost of
funding it is more appropriate to use the statutory tax rate.

A 30% tax rate on a financing cost of 2.7% makes the after-tax cost of funds 1.89% – giving the transaction a slightly positive Net Present Value on an after-tax basis … subject to any peculiarities the purchase premium might have on the taxation of the bank.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 1:37 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.