WIKIMEDIA, KLIP GAMEOnly a week after its NASDAQ debut on August 1, biotech company Vascular Biogenics terminated its initial public offering (IPO) last week (August 8) after key investors withdrew payment for shares they had promised to buy.
Dubbed the “IPO that wasn’t” by The Wall Street Journal, the firm traded 5.4 million shares at $12 each for six days before announcing that no shares would be issued. The company’s underwriters, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo Securities LLC, ended the IPO agreement “due to an unexpected situation in which a substantial existing U.S. shareholder did not fund payment for shares it previously agreed to purchase in the offering,” according to a company press release.
The situation is unusually thorny because public trading continued after the settlement date, so regulators will likely need to reverse the trades, according to CNBC. “IPO watchers I talked to are scratching their heads over this one,” wrote CNBC stocks editor Bob Pisani. “There have been cases where an ...
