Retail Bond And Convertible Note Disclosure Relief

ASIC last night released its much-anticipated disclosure regime for retail bonds.

As well as facilitating a retail corporate bond market in Australia, the suite of changes aims to ease disclosure requirements for convertible notes.

In brief, the package:

• allows vanilla bonds to be issued under a special prospectus, modelled on transaction-specific prospectuses;
• allows vanilla bond prospectuses to be in two parts (with the general idea being that one part would be a base prospectus for several offers and the other would contain information specific to a particular tranche);
• allows the base prospectus to have a life of two years (the issue-specific prospectus would have a 13 month life);