Benessere (NASDAQ:BENE) has adjourned its extension vote to 10 am ET January 7 as it works to round up votes having failed to achieve sufficient turnout at its original special meeting on January 5.
Tomorrow is also the SPAC’s transaction deadline and if fewer than 65% of its shares participate in the vote to extend this deadline, it will be forced to liquidate its trust. This is an unusual situation for a SPAC to find itself in, but it has occurred with multiple deals over the past two years. In most cases, turnout issues are caused by a high percentage of retail investor ownership with those investors being unfamiliar with the voting process, but the fact that this vote is occurring as shareholders are slowly coming back from the holidays likely does not help.
In Benessere’s case, the high retail contingent may be less about its deal than its team. The SPAC announced its $805 million combination with hydrogen fuel supplier eCombustible on November 24, but this came about a month after this same team, led by Chairman and CEO Patrick Orlando, announced the combination of its other vehicle Digital World (NASDAQ:DWAC) with Trump Media and Technology Group.
This deal of course broke all the records for single day price performance on announcement, and some traders appear to have expected the same reaction to another Patrick Orlando deal by Benessere, driving its price up to a high of $18.90 on the day of the eCombustible announcement.
There has been plenty of shareholder turnover since then, and Benessere opened this morning at $10.18, slightly above its estimated $10.15 pro rata trust value. Should it liquidate, that is all that investors will get, but it has pledged to add $0.20 per share to the trust in connection with the extension, sweeting the pot to $10.35 per share. This would normally be plenty of incentive to keep investors in even if they planned to redeem at the completion vote, but, again, these shareholders or their third-party brokers may not be fully paying attention.
In the recent past, SPACs facing low-turnout hiccups have always surmounted the issue with some extra time on the clock, but Patrick Orlando did see another of his SPACs — Yunhong International — liquidate in November.
Terms Tracker for the Week Ending March 24, 2023 Welcome to our weekly column where we discuss the findings from our IPO terms tracker based on the previous week’s pricings. While this week was relatively quiet on the filings front, we did see March’s second SPAC IPO price with Oak Woods Acquisition Corp’s $50 million...
Latest Non-Redemption Agreements: ExcelFin Acquisition Corp. ExcelFin Acquisition Corp. (XFIN) Adds Non-Redemption Agreement In connection with the special meeting of stockholders of ExcelFin Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ:XFIN) to extend its completion deadline from April 25, 2023 to October 25, 2023, the company and its sponsor, ExcelFin SPAC LLC, entered into a non-redemption agreement with an unaffiliated third party....
Below is a daily summary of links to the latest SPAC news and rumors gathered across the web. Latest SPAC News: Momentus SPAC backers accused of deliberately engineering a catastrophic deal Momentus SPAC Backers Accused of Hiding Disastrous Deal’s Flaws A Momentus Inc. (NASDAQ:MNTS) investor sued backers of its blank-check merger with a shell company,...
DiamondHead Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ:DHHC) announced in an 8-K this morning that its shareholders approved its combination with Great Southern Homes at a special meeting March 23. Only 109,426 shares were redeemed in the connection with the vote, but DiamondHead has seen about 87% redemptions in total across all previous votes, leaving it with about $43.9...
Graf Acquisition Corp. IV (NYSE:GFOR) announced that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent to combine with clinical-stage biopharma company NKGen. This announcement is not a pure teaser as Graf IV is not facing an imminent extension vote and currently has until May 25 on its clock. It does, however, signal something of a...