Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). And your first question comes from the line of Jacques Garibaldi with Royal Capital
Jacques Garibaldi - Royal Capital
Hi, good morning everyone.
Ian Cockerill
Hi, Jacques.
Jacques Garibaldi - Royal Capital
I am taking back to the fall and when you first said that what scenario it is deal. My understanding was that you all were -- you were not going to raise equity that you knew the hedge book was around $500 and $550 million and if you close it out, you would close it out with debt and that you were comfortable with debt and in fact this pro forma 1.7 times debt to EBITDA that you'll have in January 30th is within your comfort parameters. So, given all that can you just explain what changed since the fall and why you are raising 12% of your equity basically?
Ian Cockerill
Jacques, I think there is a misinterpretation on your part. When we took out the or when we made the acquisition in when we were going to make this acquisition in -- as you called it in the fall, we at that stage knew that we would have $1.2 billion worth of debt and that was the debt level that we had. There was a mark-to-market position on the hedge book, but it had not been crystallized. So, it wasn’t that we said that we were going to take out the hedge book. We didn’t know what the hedge book was like at that stage. We had a rough idea of the level of the mark-to-market, but certainly not at that stage had any intention of crystallizing it. Once we've taken over the company and once we actually had a good look at this, it became quite clear that to get the support of the banks in this transaction, the hedge counterparties, but it was important that we actually looked to doing something constructive with this hedge.
Now, the best solution that we came up with was in fact we should actually close the hedge out as and when an opportune time came, take the pain in the short-term and then move on in a purely unhedged fashion. That meant that we actually had to, as you heard Nick say, we had to increase our debt level to 500 -- another $530 million. That took us up to, by the end, something in the order of $1.9 billion.
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