We believe it seems disingenuous of Brookfield’s vice-chair to release media statements illustrating how companies should pay more for pollution, while Brookfield-controlled DBI is pursuing socialisation of clean-up costs for a major coal infrastructure expansion. It is not entirely obvious that investors - the key non-Queensland stakeholders in DBI - are optimising on the welfare of current and future Queensland generations in general or taxpayers in particular.
The performance of DBI since the IPO in Dec 2020 has been -26% versus the relevant index and we sympathise with the retail investors’ view on the IPO - it did look a bit like a “pump and dump” operation. If retail investors believe that the socialisation assumption was not clear enough in the prospectus or that they otherwise did not get a full disclosure of investment risks, our advice is to contact the relevant parties of the IPO joint lead parties.
