Love You Don't - Nab Tells London Market It's Over
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 12, 2006
IT WAS February 1964. The Beatles were top of the singles chart with the double A-sided release of I Saw Her Standing There/Love Me Do, Robert Menzies had entered the last two years of his record-breaking prime ministership and the National Australia Bank joined in the global spirit of the Swinging Sixties by listing on the London Stock Exchange.
Fast forward 42 1/2 years and the Beatles are number eight in the ARIA album charts with Love, Menzies protege John Howard is a four-times election winner and the NAB decides to call Australia well and truly home by cancelling its LSE listing.With just 13,497 of its 370,500 shareholders in the UK, the NAB has decided the cost of keeping its quotation is no longer worth it and believes that increasing globalisation means it can be just as easy to trade over the internet as using a broker to buy shares through the London market.It cost the NAB around $300,000 a year to be quoted in London even though trading in its shares has been "very quiet" for some time. The last trade involved just 700 shares and was in November last year, said a NAB spokeswoman.NAB's listing will formally disappear on January 17.
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald