The Securities Commission has granted an issuer relief from the requirement to include certain interim financial statements in a business acquisition report (BAR) under National Instrument 51-102 Continuous Disclosure Obligations (NI 51-102), section 13.1. The issuer, a reporting company in Canada, acquired Gold Standard Ventures Corp. (GSV) and was required to file a BAR with updated financial statements for GSV. However, GSV had previously filed an information circular containing financial statements for periods close to those required for the BAR.
The issuer could not directly rely on exemptions in NI 51-102, subsections 8.4(4) and (6), because it was GSV, not the issuer, that filed the information circular. To comply, the issuer proposed to file the information circular under its own profile and include the financial statements from the circular in its BAR.
The Commission agreed to the exemption, provided that the issuer files the information circular under its SEDAR profile and includes the relevant financial statements from the circular in the BAR. This decision was made under the securities legislation of British Columbia and Ontario and is also applicable in other Canadian jurisdictions through the Multilateral Instrument 11-102 Passport System. The British Columbia Securities Commission served as the principal regulator for this application.