HEALTHSCOPE LTD Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said in March the government wanted to list Medibank some time before June 30, 2015 to benefit from a boom in IPO issuance while the sharemarket trades near record levels.
Health-related listings like private hospital operator Healthscope Ltd (>> Healthscope Ltd) and aged care provider Japara Healthcare Ltd (>> Japara Healthcare Ltd) are trading at significant premiums to their issue prices.
"The government is satisfied that this timing (December) best meets our objectives for a sale," Cormann said in a statement.
The offer will be available to retail investors and local and international institutions. All Australians will be able to register for a prospectus in late September before it is lodged with authorities in October.
The government has not given a target valuation for Medibank but the listing is widely expected to fetch about $4 billion. Added to the A$8.3 billion already raised this year in Australian IPOs, that would get close to the record A$12.7 billion raised in 1997, the country's biggest year of new listings.
Medibank, which has 3.5 million members, is one of a host of mature state-owned assets being sold by Australian governments who say they have identified some A$120 billion of potential asset sales in the next two years.
On Thursday, the state of Western Australia said it wanted to sell up to A$2 billion of assets including the Port Hedland shipping terminal and another A$4 billion to A$5 billion of assets in the next two to three years.
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(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Stephen Coates)
