Australian miner OZ Minerals rejected a US$1.22 billion recapitalization proposal in favor of proceeding with a shareholder vote on an investment by China Minmetals Non-ferrous Metals, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bid had been submitted last week by Australian investment and advisory business RFC Corporate and RBC Capital Markets, an investment-banking arm of Royal Bank of Canada. OZ said it rejected the joint recapitalization offer because it "wasn’t sufficiently certain," and offered no clear advantages over the proposal to sell assets to Minmetals. The recapitalization would have raised US$1 billion in equity and convertible bonds and another US$220 million under a working-capital facility for OZ Minerals. Minmetals had an earlier takeover bid of OZ Minerals rejected over national security concerns; the revised bid, submitted in late March, sought to address those concerns by not including OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill mine, which is located in a military zone.
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