To say that Independent's recent €100 million (£78.7 million) placing came as a surprise is no understatement and so far the company has given no plausible explanation as to why it chose to sell off more than 50 million new shares when the share price was at a two-and-a-half-year low.

That is one question shareholders can ask Sir Anthony O'Reilly and the Indo board at the extraordinary general meeting on Monday week to approve the second tranche of the placing. (The first tranche was implemented under existing pre-emption rights and is not subject to shareholder approval.)

The other question they can ask is why Sir Anthony was apparently given a special arrangement to maintain his shareholding by taking up almost 27 per cent of the placing. Note well, this is a placing and not an open offer or a rights issue, so why was Sir Anthony allowed to participate while other shareholders were not?

Existing shareholders who see Indo shares as cheap at the moment - they are now trading 10 cents below the placing price - might have been happy to put more money into the company in a rights issue, or at least sell their nil paid rights into the market if they did not want to spend more money on Indo equity. But only one shareholder seems to have been given that option, the Laird of Lyford Cay himself, Sir Anthony.

No doubt Indo's placing and Sir Anthony's participation in the fundraising are fully in accordance with listing requirements. But the bald fact is that one large shareholder has been able to take part in a fundraising while others who might have wished to do so have not.

As for the timing of the placing, finance director Mr Jim Parkinson's comment that the timing was "out of our hands" is as lame an explanation as Current Account has heard in years of Dublin market-watching.

How such a major move as selling more than €100 million worth of equity was out of Indo's control is not clear, to say the very least.

Mr Parkinson's comment was interpreted in some quarters as meaning that Independent was forced into its snap placing to boost its equity and meet banking covenants. That interpretation was vociferously rejected by an Indo spokesman, who insisted that the group was fully compliant with its banking covenants, while Mr Gavin O'Reilly, chief executive of Independent News and Media's Irish operations, said the money was for "general corporate purposes" - that means acquisitions in plain English - and not for paying down Indo's debt.

It's probably just as well that the money is not for debt repayment, as the €100 million raised would make no more than a very modest dent in Indo's €1.5 billion debt mountain.

Indo's broker, Davy, has estimated Indo's end-2001 interest cover as just 2.9 times, a level that does not put Indo under any pressure when it comes to meeting financing obligations but also does not leave an awful lot of leeway when it comes to acquisitions, such as buying out Express's 50 per cent of the Star - not to mention a mega-bid for the likes of Fairfax.

The arrival of the Daily Mail on the Irish newspaper scene - albeit in a modest fashion through its acquisition of Ireland on Sunday - also represents a challenge to Indo's hegemony on its own patch.