Seat PG Moves Board approval of its H1 accounts from 3rd August to 29th August
“Hold” all bonds
Yesterday, Seat made the rather unusal move to postpone the announcements of its H1 results to 29th August. These were scheduled originally for August 3rd. This may be a completely innocent move, however we speculate that the recent spillover of the European debt crisis into Italy may well have impacted Seat’s ongoing restructuring talks, perhaps creating a rather pressing issue for the Board, although we recognise that as a publicly listed entity it has an obligation to disclose price sensitive material information to the market. Either way, given the uncertainty surrounding Seat’s current position in the context of intense and ongoing speculation over Italy’s creditworthiness, we maintain our “Hold” recommendation on Seat senior bonds. Although on paper Lighthouse would stil represent the fulcrum security in our view, we feel that the overall uncertainty surrounding Italian sovereign debt and banks make Lighthouse an even more speculative position to take, hence we change our recommendation from speculative buy below 30 to hold. We maintain our “Very High Risk” assessment on the LARA scale.