While frantic trading pushed Carabella’s shares slightly above the A42c offered by its 11% shareholder Wealth Mining – with the offer being a 110% premium to the previous closing price on Monday – Carabella’s board urged its other shareholders to take no action.

“The board advises that it received an unsolicited, incomplete, indicative, non-binding proposal from the bidder shortly before 9.00pm on 3 December 2013,” Carabella told the market.

“The indicative proposal was subject to a number of conditions, including due diligence investigations and Carabella was seeking to clarify a number of matters in order to consider the board's position.”

About an hour and twenty minutes later the bidder’s statement was announced.

While it didn’t provide detail in terms of the offer timeframes, Wealth Mining previously said the offer was scheduled to open around December 19 and close around January 20.

Kingho founding chairman Qinghua Huo viewed the acquisition of Carabella as an important first strategic step to expanding outside of China.

“We believe that our offer provides compelling and certain value for Carabella shareholders at a time when there is significant illiquidity in Carabella’s shares and uncertainty over the funding and development pathway for Carabella’s assets,” he said.

Wealth Mining Australia deputy chairman Ian Hutchinson also made it clear the takeover attempt was a hostile one.

“The Carabella board has not provided any satisfactory written response to Wealth Mining’s requests for genuine engagement within an acceptable timeframe,” he said.

According to the bidder’s statement, privately held Kingho had eight coal mines with 3 billion tonnes of resources at the end of 2012, with total production capacity of about 15 million tonnes per annum.

Kingho said it owned three iron ore mines in China with production capacity of about 3.85Mt.

Carabella’s Bluff open cut metallurgical coal project in central Queensland is targeting 1.4Mt run of mine with first exports in 2015.