Alternative financing: An adventure into the unknown

Jerome Booth: leadership

Brazilian fund manager GP Investimentos (Garantia Partners), for instance, raised $300 million on the Brazilian stock market by issuing not ordinary shares but rather Brazilian depositary receipts, or BDRs. The reason is that Garantia Partners is headquartered in Bermuda, so the company needed a listing outside Brazil. Nearly all the liquidity in the stock is on the Brazilian Bovespa, but the official main listing is in Luxembourg. Other Latin companies are also rumoured to be looking at European dual listings: mining and especially financial stocks are well thought of in Europe, and now that Sarbanes-Oxley has made New York listings unattractive it’s entirely possible that banks that can’t find a strategic fit with the likes of HSBC might find themselves floating on a NYSE-owned London Stock Exchange.