Bank towers are shown from Bay Street in Toronto's financial district, on Wednesday, June 16, 2010. Canada's largest city is getting itself a new resident this year: the headquarters of the federal government's new infrastructure financing agency. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrien Veczan
Home Capital: Inside the lender's meltdown
In the early hours of Monday, May 1, exhausted representatives for Home Capital and a group of lenders hung up the phone in frustration. A deal to give the company an emergency $2-billion loan appeared to be falling apart. Directors at the mortgage firm felt that without the money, they wouldn't be able to open for business a few hours later.
The dramatic story of a financial institution's near-collapse. Story (Janet McFarland, Andrew Willis, Niall McGee, David Parkinson, Rita Trichur, Jacqueline Nelson, Christina Pellegrini and James Bradshaw)
With PrivateBancorp takeover, CIBC must work to make deal pay off
There's an old line about the dog that catches the car. That's Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
The Toronto-based bank just sunk its teeth into PrivateBancorp Inc., scoring a landmark victory Friday when shareholders in the U.S. bank voted in favour of CIBC's $4.9-billion takeover, an offer that was twice sweetened and very much in doubt until the final ballot was counted.
After spending 11 gruelling months chasing Chicago-based PrivateBancorp, CIBC chief executive officer Victor Dodig doesn't have the luxury of resting. The real work at PrivateBancorp has just begun. The new owner needs to dramatically improve the financial performance from the U.S. bank to make this deal pay off for CIBC shareholders. Story (Andrew Willis)
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Hydro One stock sale hits a wall
Ontario's move to unload a $2.8-billion stake in Hydro One Ltd. has hit a standstill after investors balked at the stock sale, leaving underwriters with as much as half of the shares unsold.
The province's cash-strapped Liberal government announced the huge offering Monday, selling 120 million shares at $23.25 apiece to a syndicate of investment banks on a bought-deal basis. That means the shares were purchased up front by the underwriters in hopes of reselling them quickly to public investors.
But tepid investor demand for the issue means the underwriters, led by Royal Bank of Canada and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, were holding as much as $1.4-billion worth of stock as of Thursday, according to people familiar with the situation. Story (Tim Kiladze and Jeff Lewis)
Real Matters stock flat in long-awaited IPO
Real Matters Inc. joined an exclusive club of publicly listed Canadian tech companies, becoming only the third such company since 2014 to raise more than $100-million in its initial public offering.
Unlike those other recent tech IPOs, Real Matters – which provides software tools to banks and lenders for real estate appraisals critical to the home-mortgage market – did not see the same kind of opening-day share price bump of either Kinaxis Inc. (up 14 per cent in its 2014 debut) or Shopify Inc. (up 51 per cent in its 2015 opener). Story (Shane Dingman)
Kinder Morgan seeks $1.75-billion IPO to fund Trans Mountain
Kinder Morgan Inc.'s Canadian unit is seeking to raise $1.75-billion in an initial public offering to help fund its contentious Trans Mountain pipeline expansion as the project inches closer to construction.
Houston-based Kinder Morgan plans to offer the restricted voting shares at between $19 and $22 apiece while retaining an ownership stake of up to 77 per cent, according to an updated prospectus filed Wednesday.
The offering is led by Toronto-Dominion Bank and Royal Bank of Canada and is expected to be completed by the end of May. It will list on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Story (Jeff Lewis)
PSP charts ambitious investment course with European hub
The Public Sector Pension Investment Board is ramping up plans for international expansion, opening a London office and charting a more ambitious investment course.
The pension fund said Wednesday that it would launch a European hub to boost the fund's investment exposure to the region, primarily through asset classes such as private equity and debt, infrastructure and real estate. It's the latest effort by PSP to expand to key financial markets beyond Canada, and catch up to other Canadian pension giants that have steadily built beachheads around the globe. Story (Jacqueline Nelson)