Benitec aims to boost investor confidence

Gene silencing company Benitec is treating its de-listing by the Australian Stock Exchange as an administrative hiccup but the incident comes at an awkward time for the young biotech.

Trading in Benitec shares was suspended on the ASX on October 28 when the company failed to meet the deadline for filing its annual report. Trading resumed on November 12 after the company supplied the missing report to the ASX.

The lapse was related to the difficulties of consolidating accounts among multiple entities in its complicated corporate structure, according to acting managing director Dr James Anderson.

Benitec Australia is the subsidiary of a UK-based company that was backed into defunct listed miner Queensland Opals.

The manoeuvre created "a lot of entities to get cleared up and we didn't get our consolidation done in time to file the annual report," Anderson said.

The problem for Benitec was that its suspension and surrounding bad publicity occurred while CEO John McKinley was in Europe talking to potential strategic partners and attempting to raise fresh funds.

In that context, the de-listing did not create a positive impression and "some confidence-building measures will have to be put in place," Anderson said, without specifying what measures the company had in mind.

At the same time, the company believes the value of its patents are sufficient to maintain investor confidence.

"We don't anticipate we will see a lot of shareholders selling out when we re-list," he said. Benitec maintains it has a dominant intellectual property (IP) position in RNA interference gene silencing for mammals.

However, the situation is not straightforward because CSIRO, which claims to share in the IP, is opposing Benitec's patent application.

Despite extended negotiations, an early resolution to the issue does not appear to be in the offing and the two parties may well end by settling their differences in court.

On an unrelated front, Benitec is talking with organisers of the International Congress of Genetics, to be held in Melbourne in July next year, about possible modifications to its sponsorship of the event.