Dreamworld owner Ardent Leisure is listing anew under a different code

Ardent Leisure, the holiday park company most well-known for owning the Dreamworld theme park on the Gold Coast, will debut on the ASX today under the new code ALG.

In October 2016, four people were killed at Dreamworld’s Thunder River Rapids Ride. The inquest is still continuing into the theme park’s maintenance, and health and safety processes.

Ardent Leisure was hit hard by the tragedy, its shares dropping 22 per cent over the course of the three days after the accident. They are currently at a five and a half year low of $1.49.

The company has been listed under the code AAD but in October decided to restructure the company and associated trust into one business, called Ardent Leisure Group, which will list today at 11am under the code ALG.

Up until today, Ardent Leisure Group comprised Ardent Leisure Limited and Ardent Leisure Management Limited as the responsible entity for the Ardent Leisure Trust.

Ardent Leisure stapled securities (ASX:AAD) over the past year. They will now trade under ALG after corporatisation.

Ardent’s ‘stapled securities’ were put into suspension on Thursday.

Stapled securities are created when two or more securities are contractually bound together so that they cannot be bought or sold separately. The two parts are usually a share in one company and a unit in a trust related to that company.

At the company’s recent annual general meeting, chairman Gary Weiss said the group’s previous structure was “no longer relevant”.

“The proposed corporatisation has a number of benefits for the group, including greater flexibility to fund investment in growth, simplification of the corporate structure which may make the group more attractive to a broad range of investors, reduced head office costs, including certain reporting and regulatory compliance costs, reduced regulatory uncertainty that is inherent in stapled structures, the new structure better facilitates any potential development of excess land at Dreamworld from a tax perspective and simplification in financial reporting,” he said.

Ardent is currently upgrading the Dreamworld theme park, adding new rides, entertainment and retail shops in order to lure patrons during the summer holiday season.