Underwriters for Rio Tinto's Australian market capital raising have found buyers for all of the shares that remained unsold from the offer, the company has said.
The world's third-biggest mining company received acceptances for 94.76 per cent of new shares offered under a 21-for-40 rights offer at $28.29 a piece, leaving some 7.86 million shares on offer.
Those shares were offloaded today by underwriters Macquarie and JPMorgan at $48.50 each following a bookbuild, after Rio entered a trading halt to allow the process to complete.
The Australian leg of the issue raised $4.02 billion.
Earlier on Friday, Rio said it had sold the last the remaining shares offered in its rights issue in the UK, with two brokers finding buyers after the issue had closed.
Credit Suisse and JP Morgan Cazenove found buyers for 15,882,790 new London-listed Rio Tinto shares offered at 2,100 pence.
When the issue closed, Rio had placed 96.97 per cent of new shares offered.
Rio's major shareholder, Chinese government-owned Chinalco, has said it would take up all its rights under the capital raising.
The $US15.2 billion equity raising was launched after Rio scrapped a planned refinancing deal with Chinalco and instead struck a joint venture deal with BHP Billiton.
The rights issue will pay down some of Rio's $48.27 billion of debt, mostly incurred by its takeover of Canadian aluminium giant Alcan in 2007.
Chinalco's shares in Rio are through the UK-listed entity.
AAP
