Looking at our G&A expense, it’s important and also to note that there is $3.3 million of expense associated with our restatement work and the implementation of the new valuation methodology which isn’t money we expect to need to spend further on. I’m moving to Page 12 now. I know there’s a lot of information on this page and I’ll try and capture some of the highlights. Starting off in the top left, cash receipts here are $247 million in the first half of 2023. That’s significantly higher than $99 million for the same period last year. And just looking at that metric in the first – in the second quarter, that’s a $150 million. Our liquidity and receivables are in a strong position as of period-end, highlighted by the $441 million of cash and securities, as well as $93 million of receivables.
We’ve talked about these receivables before and as of this call, we can mention that almost 75% of those receivables have converted to cash, including the one longer-dated receivable which had been – which was unusual and which was paid in full. It was tied to some collateral litigation that was unrelated to the case, but that’s all resolved. Obviously, we don’t intend to hold this much cash or cash near these levels, and we look forward to putting that to work and we’re still digesting the bond issuance and the cash realizations that have occurred to date. And the bottom of the page shows our leverage levels. We remain well below our covenant levels. We did redeem our 2024 issuance right after the quarter-end. Just for context, if you looked at these leverage levels, we could probably issue close to $1.5 billion or more debt today and still be within the covenant levels.
With that, I will turn it back to Chris.
Christopher Bogart: Thanks very much, and I am turning to Slide 13. You’ve seen this slide before, we call these the four pillars of Burford’s value proposition. The slide is here as a reminder of the components that you get from being a Burford equity holder. And we’re very pleased with how all four of those pillars are standing and growing right now. The core portfolio, as I said earlier, is now at – now stands at $7 billion, so that portends a very long future runway and a sizable future runway of potential realizations over time. And notably, we’re now at the $2.5 billion mark of having returned cash successfully from investments. And we’ve seen our returns continue to be strong and stable across that $2.5 billion. So, that’s a real track record.
In terms of origination, we’ve done more than $1 billion of new business in both last year and the year before, and with more than $0.5 billion through the first half, which is historically seasonally lower than the second half. We feel good about the quality of our origination platform. Asset management is something that is producing a nice amount of cash for us as well. Half over half, we more than doubled the cash receipts from the asset management business. And I think the YPF assets don’t need any further discussion. I will just make one further note about quarterly reporting. And I’ve said this before, but I will say it again. And I find it always helpful to be saying it on the back of a good quarter instead of a bad quarter. We don’t – we can’t run the business on a quarterly basis.
We don’t try to. And by the way, as I’ve also said for many years, we don’t run the business on an accounting basis. We look fundamentally at our ability to produce long-term desirable returns on a cash basis. That’s how we run the business. Those are the numbers that Jon and I look at when we evaluate how the Company is doing. I do not in this business get regular weekly or monthly reporting on an accounting basis that shows me how the accounting numbers are looking. So, it’s very different than some of the businesses that I’ve been involved in the past where we really managed to an accounting number. We can’t do that here. So, we manage to a cash number and I think that’s a satisfactory way of going about doing it. And what that means in terms of quarterly reporting is that some will be up and some will be down, and that doesn’t trouble us particularly.
And finally, before we take your questions, I’m going to close by turning to Slide 14. We put in this text quotation from Judge Preska’s ruling last week in the YPF case. And I’m not citing it here to talk more about YPF, but rather to say that this very perceptive comment by Judge Preska is a good opportunity for some broader reflection about the business and where we’re headed. Now, after 14 years, we’re at the point of what we do being valued by our corporate clients, obviously, who are now using billions of dollars of our capital, respected by the courts, and frankly, critical to the ongoing evolution of the legal industry as the business of law transforms itself from a pure cash business into a larger and more complex enterprise. And that really portends a very bright future for Burford.
And just in terms of scale, the legal industry is absolutely enormous. Just measuring lawyer costs, we’re about the same size as global pharma, global pharmaceutical. If you add in judgments and settlements, that takes us far beyond that level. So, this is one of the largest industries on the planet. And Burford in its operation in that industry is barely today a teenager. We are changing this industry. We’re in the vanguard of doing so. We’re reaping the benefits of it, as you can see, both financially and existentially in with comments like this from very senior federal judges. And we are very excited to see what the next period in our history brings. We couldn’t do it without your support. We’re grateful for it. And with that, we’re happy to take your questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] I’ll now hand back to Chris for any webcast questions.
Christopher Bogart: Thanks. So, we’ll start with a webcast question from Graham Birch, which candidly, I should have addressed affirmatively. Graham asks, on the last call you said an exercise would be undertaken as of 30, June 2023 to see what percentage of shares were held by U.S. shareholders with a view to checking whether it was greater than 50%. What was the outcome of this exercise and what percentage of the shares are held by U.S. shareholders? So, that’s an excellent question, and the – just the background to it is, that 50% number is what would tip us out of the current category of being what’s called a foreign private issuer in the U.S. and into a regular U.S. filer, which would come with some incremental, for example, mandatory quarterly reporting and so on.
