Mexico City — Mexican construction company Empresas ICA will change its name as part of a series of modifications that include the delisting of its so-called ‘zombie’ shares from the Mexican Stock Exchange.
Shareholders representing 95.47% of ICA’s outstanding shares approved on August 18 during an extraordinary meeting the change of the company’s corporate name, which will now be known as Inanis Sociedad.
“It will remain under the same legal framework,” ICA stated in a summary of assembly agreements distributed on the Mexican Stock Exchange.
ICA, the acronym for Ingenieros Civiles Asociados, was founded in 1947 by engineer Bernardo Quintana. The company became one of the largest construction companies in Mexico, and a leading participant in projects such as the Mexico City Metro, the Azteca Stadium and the Basilica of Guadalupe.
The company went through insolvency proceedings after facing financial problems that began in 2015 due to government cuts to infrastructure projects, the devaluation of the exchange rate, and the cancellation of the contract under which it was to build an aqueduct that would bring water to the city of Monterrey, in Nuevo León state.
Following a Commercial Bankruptcy that concluded in 2017, operations came to an end at Empresas ICA. Among the current major shareholders of Empresas ICA are Bernardo Quintana Isaac, Management Trust, and Fundación Trust, according to Bloomberg.
ICA Tenedora, led by Guadalupe Phillips, has emerged as the successor to the company founded 76 years ago, and is involved in infrastructure projects led by the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government, such as the Tren Maya and Dos Bocas Refinery.
Shareholders of Empresas ICA also approved the cancellation of the company’s shares from the National Securities Registry (Registro Nacional de Valores). The document specifies that 58,658 million shares of the issuer’s social capital will be canceled.
The Empreas ICA ticker ICA* ceased to operate on August 28, 2017, when the Mexican Stock Exchange announced its suspension on the failure to present financial documentation for the second quarter of that year.
From that moment until the present, the shares have had a price of MXN$1.48 per unit. Shares remained frozen in the market, waiting for trading to resume.
In 2018, when the issuer exited commercial bankruptcy, analysts expected Companies ICA to perform a reverse split, which means buying outstanding shares and consolidating them in a few hands, but the process was not carried out.
--This story was updated at 22:50 with a clarification from the company, specifying in the title and paragraphs that the name change was for Companies ICA and clarifying that the changes are not related to ICA Tenedora, a private company led by Guadalupe Phillips.
