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Vodafone and Verizon – how will they use the cash?

ShareSoc has issued a press release on the likely deal for Vodafone to sell its stake in Verizon Wireless (see www.sharesoc.org/pr50vodafone.html). This might realise over US$100bn in cash so the key question is what the company will do with it. Will it waste it on other acquisitions or return it to shareholders? And in the latter case in what form? Vodafone is a company that appears to love share buy-backs like many FTSE-100 companies. But ShareSoc suggests that it would be better ...

Dunedin Enterprise – Chairman stepping down

Dunedin Enterprise Investment Trust announced its half-year results this morning. They were unremarkable. But the good news in the announcement was the mention that David Gamble is retiring from the board, and hence as Chairman, at the next AGM. ShareSoc attacked this company for the introduction of a performance fee in October 2012, under Mr Gamble’s chairmanship. It seemed totally unnecessary to compensate the fund manager in the way chosen because of a change in investment policy, with the risk of substantially ...

EuroFinuse attacks lack of retail investor representation

Guillaume Prache of EuroFinuse (of which ShareSoc is a member) has been attacking the lack of adequate retail investor representation on European bodies that devise financial market regulations. Specifically he has attacked the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and its Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group where only a few of the 30 members on the committees are consumer advocates (i.e. retail investors). He complains the big banks are dominating policy development on European financial market regulations which of course now ...

Media Corporation – Cessation of Business

Media Corporation – Cessation of Business One of the first “problem” companies that ShareSoc reported on (and got involved with to a limited extent, although it always appeared to be somewhat of a basket case) was Media Corporation (MDC). We first covered it in our June 2011 newsletter when the share price was about 1.5 pence. After various changes of strategy and management upheavals, the shares were suspended from AIM (not for the first time) in April at 0.095 pence, after much ...

RSM Tenon Pre-Pack: an odd connection

ShareSoc has made many representations in the past about the abusive use of pre-pack administrations. In the case of publicly listed companies, they usually mean the ordinary shares become instantly worthless. The latest case of a pre-pack in a listed company is that of RSM Tenon. This company (an accountancy practice oddly enough) got into difficulty by taking on excessive debt for a growth strategy. Baker Tilly were negotiating to buy the business for a rock bottom price. But yesterday it ...