RPT-Bay Street Week Ahead-The small guy cracks the ABCP whip
(Repeats Friday's column)
MONTREAL, April 6 (Reuters) - Irate investors saddled with some C$350 million of frozen asset-backed commercial paper investments want all of their money back, and signs are that Bay Street will have to placate them to prevent the collapse of its workout plan for all C$33 billion of the strange stuff.
Eight months after the ABCP market choked on credit concerns, a committee headed by lawyer Purdy Crawford that was set up to craft a solution has heard a barrage of complaints about its plan from small investors.
A quick cross-country roadshow on the plan, known as the Montreal Accord, seemed to wear down even the stoic 76-year-old Crawford, who as chief executive of former tobacco and financial services conglomerate Imasco was one of the few business chiefs brave enough to answer his own office telephone.
He prefaced the investor meetings in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver by saying the committee did not create the ABCP crisis, but was working hard to fix it.
That did not stop retail investors from blasting the committee for working behind closed doors to craft a deal that would benefit giant players such as Quebec pension fund manager Caisse de depot et placement while keeping smaller individual and corporate investors out of the loop.
Even though as a group they represent only 1 percent of the value of the ABCP that falls under the plan, retail investors get one vote each just like everyone else, and they far outnumber the big corporate players. For the restructuring plan to pass, a majority of investors at an April 25 meeting need to vote for it.
But by voting in favor of the deal, small investors would give up the right to sue their brokers and banks in return for a promise to get an unknown amount of money back sometime down the road.
"You're putting a gun to my head, and I think that is not the right approach," investor Mark Wasserman told the committee in Montreal.
The Caisse, which is Canada's largest pension fund and holds C$12.6 billion of nonbank ABCP, has led the rescue posse since the dark day in mid-August when big international banks balked at backing the paper.
The once top-rated short-term debt instruments suddenly became illiquid, bad news for investors who thought they had safely parked their money in something they could easily switch into cash.
Under the Crawford committee plan, the short-term ABCP would be converted into longer-term debt, which means investors could have to wait up to eight years to get their money back.
BLOWUP COULD AFFECT GLOBAL MARKETS
Small investors, and corporations holding hundreds of millions of dollar in ABCP, much of it needed for working capital, can be forgiven for feeling the workout plan has the interests of the biggest players most at heart.
Some 1,400 retail clients of Canaccord Capital Inc (CCI.TO) who invested in ABCP are among those hoping to come in from the cold. Continued...
