Mysterious Trades in a Big Block of Tokyo Electric Shares Draw Regulators’ Interest

[bananas]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/business/global/19tepco.html

Mysterious Trades in a Big Block of Tokyo Electric Shares Draw Regulators’ Interest
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: April 18, 2011

TOKYO — Japanese regulators and executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company are asking questions about a seemingly coordinated series of stock purchases two weeks ago that led to an undisclosed buyer or buyers acquiring a large block of the utility, which owns Japan’s dangerously damaged nuclear power plant.

Regulators want to know whether the trades, valued at up to $600 million and placed from Hong Kong during the week of April 3, were structured to circumvent Japanese securities laws, which require the owner of more than 5 percent of a publicly traded company to file disclosure papers identifying the shareholder.

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Regulators are also making informal queries to determine whether the government of China or any other country might have used its sovereign wealth fund to finance the purchases, although they could have been made by hedge funds, the senior executive said.

“They’re really, really pushing, trying to figure out who it was,” the executive said of the regulators. “There’s somebody out there that holds a whale of a position, and structured the position in such a way that they don’t have to file” a mandatory disclosure.

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[Poll_Blind]

1. Interesting to say the least.

PB

[sharesunited]

2. Smart money betting that TEPCO will be okay in the long run.

If whomever it is intends to vote their shares, their identity will be known soon enough.