Big changes being worked on for Aveo

The billionaire chairman and acting CEO of Aveo’s parent company FKP, Mr. Seng Huang Lee, took the unusual step last week to talk to the media from his Hong Kong office about achieving better value from Aveo. FKP is 26% owned by his Malaysian conglomerate Mulpha, which he chairs. He says the logical thing is to create a pure retirement village and aged care business that they can list on the stock exchange. He understands that will need approval from all the stakeholders, which will be hard given the first right to purchase that Stockland holds, and the losses delivered to major superannuation fund investors like Hostplus and REST when Macquarie Bank engineered an Aveo linked public investment between 2005 and 2007 [the Retirement Village Group – RVG]. Mr. Lee indicated an early 2014 listing. In August the FKP board engaged Goldman Sachs to do a review on how to extract the most value out of Aveo. The wheels appear to be in motion.