MORE ON ANT’S IPO
Will nobody think of the underwriters?
Amid the fallout from the halted Ant Group IPO there have been many constituencies to consider: Ant founder Jack Ma; the Ant Group staff; the regulators and the Chinese Communist Party; the stock exchanges in Shanghai and Hong Kong; and the baffled would-be investors, local and international, retail and institutional.
But nobody is more nonplussed than the bookrunners, who perhaps had more to lose than anyone from all this.
The banks were looking forward to being part of a landmark; not just the biggest-ever IPO but a symbol of China and Asia rising in world markets, where record-breaking sums could be raised without troubling a US or European exchange.
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This was to be a deal that made a national contribution, a way to make a big splash...
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