The Australian

reports that Macquarie Bank, Australia’s largest home-grown
investment bank, has been snubbed by the federal Government once more
after failing to make an 11-strong institutional selling panel for the
planned $25 billion Telstra sale later this year. The latest slap in
the face comes after the millionaire factory missed out on one of the
three key roles as joint global
co-ordinator for the sale, announced by the Department of Finance last
November.

Meanwhile, the first point to note about Patrick Corp’s
latest attempt to escalate the dispute with its unwelcome bidder Toll
Holdings – by trying to have their Pacific National joint venture bring
a derivative action against Toll – is that the court apparently doesn’t
view it as an urgent matter requiring expedition, says Bryan Frith
in The Australian. With court action creeping at a snail’s pace, the
market is waiting upon the ACCC to see whether or not it will oppose a
Toll takeover of Patrick – but with Toll’s offer price is well below Patrick’s
share price and it would almost certainly have to lift the bid price to
have any chance of success.

The Age
reports that a WA based developer has bought the former South Pacific
Tyres site in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, with plans to link the
$90 million residential project with the Whitten Oval redevelopment.
Cedar Woods Properties paid $10.5 million for the nine-hectare
site, and the company has had talks with the Western Bulldogs about
integrating the residential project with the $20 million
redevelopment of the Whitten Oval, which is next to the former tyre
factory.

Meanwhile, counter-cyclical share investors always feel that the logic of
buying low and selling high is on their side, writes Malcolm Maiden in The Smage – “but as my latest ‘Dogstar’ survey shows, sometimes shares are low and high for very
good reasons.” Elsewhere, the SMH reports that investors wiped more than $300 million off the market value of
Healthscope, Australia’s second biggest private hospital operator,
after the company yesterday admitted its much-hyped acquisition of
the Gribbles pathology business had failed to boost earnings as
promised. It was a dark day for the company as Healthscope shares posted their
biggest ever one-day fall, losing nearly a quarter of their value
as they crashed $1.35 or 23.6 per cent to $4.38 – and investors fear there is more pain to come.