Well, well, hasn't the Australian Securities Exchange's compliance team drenched itself in liquid glory in its non-supervision of Big Un, the most spectacular mid-cap chicanery on the Sydney bourse since the global financial crisis. Actually, ever.
And bravo to our colleague Jonathan Shapiro, who picked this one like a dirty nose, only to be framed by comatose regulators, gormless fundies and jealous peers who patently know little about weekends going blind on paperwork to stand up yarns such as these. The clock watchers always blame the short sellers – it's the new black – forgetting that share prices tank not when shorts short, but when longs sell. Anyway, like with any of the lowest-hanging short opportunities, BIG had zero borrow available (0.18 per cent of the register). It was that bad.
But we digress. How did this thing even take off? Isn't the ASX supposed to at least pretend to conduct pre-listing due diligence?
Richard Evertz (or Evans, depending on the day) became chief executive of the ASX-listed Imagine Un in 2007, having spent time in jail the previous decade, where again he ended up in court, with false and deceptive claims attributed to him.
Yet Big Un was allowed to list (like Imagine Un, via a reverse merger) in 2014. Another triumph of due diligence excellence by the ASX. If only they'd gone for the name LOOK OVER HERE Un!
Big Un is, of course, the name of the pornographic publication that Al Bundy furtively read in Married With Children. No kidding! I mean, the bumpkins running greyhound racing cleaned up their naming standards after Beef Curtains passed Magic Carpet Burns on the back straight at Dapto.
Safe to say the committee members weren't sitting on Bridge Street in Hermes ties trousering enough loot to underwrite small shopping centres in Double Bay with their plentiful spare time. Nope, just doing their actual jobs; what a concept. You'd be forgiven for thinking the only compliance matter the ASX is capable of enforcing competently – as, Lord knows, anything meaningful has long been crowdsourced to the mad and the lonely – is its own listing fees! You could almost name a lame dishlicker after this market absurdity. This surely cannot go on …
