(Bloomberg) -- Trading in Ricardo Salinas Pliego’s flagship holding company, Grupo Elektra, remained halted as bids triggered a circuit breaker for a second straight session, stalling transactions that would slash the billionaire’s net wealth.
The highest bids on Monday were around 420 pesos per share, compared with the 944.95 pesos the stock last traded at in July, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Trading is automatically halted by the Mexican stock exchange when a share falls more than 15%.
Bolsa Mexicana de Valores lifted a trading ban on Elektra on Friday, four months after it was imposed following a dispute with a creditor. Salinas, Mexico’s third-richest man, has fought the resumption in trading which would see his net wealth of over $10 billion tumble.
Lifting the ban “will generate irreparable damage to the company, generating instability and distortion in the markets, causing conditions contrary to the healthy uses and practices of the market and putting all investors at risk,” Elektra said in a statement Friday.
It didn’t immediately comment further when contacted Monday.
Elektra was removed from the country’s benchmark stock index earlier this year after a month with no trading amid the creditor dispute. That means exchange-traded fund managers like BlackRock Inc and The Vanguard Group will likely seek to unload the stock once trading does resume. BlackRock and Vanguard are the biggest current holders of Elektra after Salinas, who owns almost 80% of the shares outstanding, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Salinas built his empire over the last four decades out of family businesses that included Elektra, which was founded in 1950 to assemble radios and later TVs. Today, Elektra stores offer white goods, telephones and motorcycles, and include branches of Banco Azteca, which help customers’ finance purchases. Salinas also controls Mexico’s No. 2 television broadcaster, as well as closely-held cable, security and energy companies.
Analysts dropped coverage of Elektra in the wake of Salinas’ 2012 battle with Mexico’s stock exchange, when it first tried to kick the stock off the benchmark IPC index due to allegations that the company was manipulating the amount of floating shares in the market.
Dispute
The stock trading halt was put in place in July at the request of Elektra, which warned regulators of a possible fraud. Salinas has since sued a company that lent him $110 million, using 7.2 million Elektra shares as collateral. His lawyers have alleged in a UK court that most of those shares were sold to fund the loans, and the rest pocketed by the lender.
As the deadline for trading to resume approached, Elektra said last week that it had won a court order blocking the comeback. In a separate statement, it added that the exchange had decided to suspend trading for 20 business days.
But the country’s securities regulator CNBV ordered the exchange to resume trading, saying it had not been informed of the ruling. An exchange spokesman confirmed the suspension had been lifted, though bids that keep triggering the exchange’s circuit breaker threshold have kept the halt in place.
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