The newspaper has read a written request from the Financial Supervisory Authority to postpone insider information. According to the document, SBB should have known about the downgrading of the credit rating as early as May 2, a reduction which, when it became known on May 8, caused the share price to plummet.
Helena Lindahl, head of investor relations at SBB, describes the procedure as completely normal. It is part of an ongoing dialogue between the credit rating agency and SBB.
— Before the notification is completed, the rating institute owns the information. It is their ratings that they publish. We cannot publish a rating they have given us. That would be completely wrong. No company has ever done that, says Helena Lindahl to TT.
The announcement of the company’s so-called junk status on the loan market, as decided by the credit rating company S&P, also caused SBB’s board to cancel the new issue on Monday evening, which would raise SEK 2.6 billion for the indebted real estate company. In addition, the share dividend is deferred to the future.
All of this, along with frayed confidence, caused the stock to dive another 15 percent on Tuesday.
The decision on the new issue was taken on April 28, i.e. just a few days before SBB, according to the document to the Financial Supervisory Authority, received the internal information about the new lowered credit rating from S&P.
The basic rule in a listed company’s provision of information is that any inside information must be shared with the stock market as soon as possible. But there are circumstances where this can be waived, and when this happens the Financial Supervisory Authority must be notified.