V&A Waterfront bid - Access denied
By Ian Fife

Short-listed bidders for the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront (V&A) say they are angry about the difficulty they have getting information from a "virtual data room" set up on the Internet by the seller Transnet's corporate advisers, Investec and Deutsche.

They say they have limited use of the mass of information on the V&A's 600 tenants and scores of individual properties and are prohibited from downloading or printing data to do their feasibility studies and for preparing bids.

This is making it difficult to have their irrevocable bids ready by the deadline of September 5. The owners have undertaken to make a decision by September 15.

"Finding the information we need and writing it down could take us two years," complains one local institutional bidder, who, like all the others, does not want to be identified.

"The lack of proper information affects the risk profile of the property and therefore our price," says an overseas investor. "And they seem to keep adding information."

Another compares the virtual data room with the information given by Nedbank when it sold its Cape Town shopping centre, Canal Walk, in 2003. "The Nedbank information was set out perfectly logically, mostly on Excel sheets that we could download and work on immediately."

Their problems have re-awakened tensions about potential conflicts between of some of the bidding parties. For instance, Growthpoint, part of the Investec stable, is also bidding. A competing bidder points out that CEO Norbert Sasse previously had a senior position in Investec Corporate Finance, the joint advisers to Transnet. Old Mutual is a bidder and also the V&A's Waterfront's valuer.

"How do we know that they are not making things difficult for us so the bidders with inside contacts have an advantage?" asks one.

But sources close to the bid say this is not the case at all.

"I don't know how they can make the connection," says the source. "A detailed conflict-of-interest policy document was drawn up ensuring that if anybody in the corporate advisory teams of both Investec and Deutsche is close to bidders in the process, those bidders are immediately disqualified. These procedures are in place and operating."

They say it is likely that only a small minority of people complained. The aim has been to treat all bidders fairly and equitably. The virtual data room is an internationally adopted procedure to ensure that this is achieved by the best route.

Where bidders felt documents were too unwieldy, they were changed and many of those documents were made available to print. The number of authorised users was also expanded to include people like legal advisers.

Access to the leases and tenant schedules remains restricted because V&A management does not want this confidential data to become public.