Interserve Share Discussion Threads

[csmwssk12hu] 16/3/2019 20:57

Nothing going to change now as a share it’s gone, but interesting to read on sky news that the lenders increased offer to Coltrane of 7.5% but they wanted 15%, I wonder why they never put 7.5% to a vote, may have changed the dynamics, for those struggling with what the percentages mean, basically 95% of the company would have went to clear £375m of the debt, so 375 divided by 95 x 5 equals what the shares would be worth £19.7m or a tad over 13p per share, at 7.5% that would have been around 20p per share, then the likely hood of increasing the share price as the threat of administration would have lifted, all in all it made no financial sense for any shareholder to vote against the deal, most companies go to the wall without the option, the only reasons you would vote against is stupidity, cut your nose off to spite your face or you made more money sending them into administration because you had either shorted it or you had interest in it’s bonds.

[tradejunkie2] 16/3/2019 20:29

I'll give you a fiver

[aztec786] 16/3/2019 18:30

Looks like Mitie could be buying part of Interservehttps://news.sky.com/story/amp/mitie-targets-interserve-lenders-with-support-services-raid-11667201

[bouleversee] 16/3/2019 18:10

Am I right in thinking that after the first big fall, the govt. continued to award them big contracts? I think that was what gave me the confidence to buy more shares as I thought the recycling problem was just a one-off they would recover from in due course. I had no idea things had got so bad that they would have to go into administration or give our shares away to their creditors. I am afraid that personal issues have prevented my monitoring my large number of holdings sufficiently for the past few years. hpcg is right; I should set stop losses but they can sometimes trigger and then the share price bounces back again in short order. I need to find out how trailing stop losses work.

[pally12] 16/3/2019 17:32

Yet another criminal activity where are all these so called finiacal odbusmen only there to keep the average investors at bay got no influence on insider trading unless your an individual investor companies are allowed to do it all the time when given the option kill your self or I will kill you which option would you take.great how the stock market activities go unpunished. There should be compensation like misold ppi

[bouleversee] 16/3/2019 13:49

… and all those expensive advisers/administrators/lawyers etc.

[fenners66] 16/3/2019 13:11

Essentially since the lenders would hold more than 75%
what they were saying any rights issue shares would become worthless as the lenders are taking this private one way or another.

Hence those very perceptive directors were NOT buying shares.

So you either vote for it to go private or you don't and it still goes private !

The danger would have been that if there had still been a market for the 5% - new buyers may have bought the shares in the market unaware of the prospectus saying its going private !

So more potential victims .... saved....

[fenners66] 16/3/2019 13:06

I suppose that in my previous post with the directors having already decided to hand over 95% or 100% of the company to the lenders , I have forgotten to mention the point they raised that :-



" it is possible that the Ordinary Shares would be suspended and/or that the Company would have to be de-listed, such that the Ordinary Shares would cease to trade on the London Stock Exchange. In these circumstances, Shareholders would lose the protection afforded by the Listing Rules and the liquidity and marketability of the Ordinary Shares would be significantly reduced, which could have a material adverse effect on the value of the Ordinary Shares"




"Further, if there is no take-up or only a limited take-up by Qualifying Shareholders under the Open Offer, the Company believes that it is likely that one or more of the Lenders may requisition a Shareholders' meeting to vote on whether to cancel the Company's listing. Whilst all Shareholders would be entitled to vote on any such resolution, if more than 75 per cent of Shareholders voted in favour of such a resolution, the resolution would be passed and the Ordinary Shares would be de-listed. A cancellation of the Company's listing would mean that Shareholders would lose the protection afforded by the Listing Rules and the liquidity and marketability of the Ordinary Shares would be significantly reduced, which could have a material adverse effect on the value of the Ordinary Shares."

[bouleversee] 16/3/2019 12:55

I have read various comments in The Times and FT this morning.

FT (Lex)said that Coltrane spent £25m on its holding and that if the plan had been approved, it would have been left with one-hundredth of that plus part of any recovery. ( I don't really follow that. I should have thought one could only know how many shares they would be left with but the value could not be determined in advance. I'm still not clear as to how many of my 2629 shares I would have been left with had it gone through and what they were likely to be worth at that point; they cost me £11,592, now worth nothing. I presume there would have been a consolidation.)

This article also said that Coltrane objected to existing investors being left with just 5%, and suspected a stitch-up with creditors. The writer said "Perhaps the loss was worth it to make a point and that perhaps Coltrane had hedged. (Does he mean by shorting? Someone told me that C. hadn't shorted recently.)

Another article in FT says the existing board will be replaced (I bet they get huge redundancy handouts) but Debbie White and Mark Whiteling are expected to be retained. Also says Coltrane has threatened to sue the directors and advisers for mis-managing the refinancing and failing to consult shareholders. (Good luck to them on that one.)

The Times article by Alex Ralph was headed: "Interserve saved after deal rejected" which didn't sound like an appropriate heading in the circumstances". It also quotes IRV as saying that the pre-pack sale would "achieve substantially the same commercial principles as the deleveraging plan" which rather confirms what I had concluded, i.e. my shares would have been worth little or nothing even if there had been a yes vote. A Cabinet Office spokesman is quoted as saying they are confident a positive way forward will be found. (I can't say I am and the employees are worried.) This article says Coltrane is said to have a £100m exposure (can we believe anything we read in the press?) though it probably hedged its bets and therefore is unlikely to have suffered such a large hit.

Are we to assume that the High Court have already consented to the administration?

(What was the point of the meeting and vote, not to mention all the phoning and letters, if they had already set up the pre-pack and if that "involves a deleveraging on "substantially" the same terms as the proposed plan, according to Interserve?)

Another article in TT by Alistair Osborne queries why Coltrane voted against the plan and outlines their proposals which would left shareholders with 7.5%. and mentions a conspiracy theory that Coltrane had cooked up a deal with banks and fellow hedgies with its own pre-pack but says that seems unlikely.

It would be interesting to know the truth about all this but all academic since we are now completely stuffed.

[fenners66] 16/3/2019 12:22

Olivers - from latest RNS

" Administrators have been appointed to Interserve Plc (in administration) ("Plc") and the completion of the sale of Plc's business and assets (i.e. the entire group) (the "Group") to a newly incorporated company to be controlled by the Group's lenders has occurred "

Its already happened.

Clearly the directors had decided this when they made the first announcement of debt for equity - when they said IF shareholders voted against it , they would do it anyway.

That puts it in perspective for me , they did not introduce or countenance any other arrangement.
They were not prepared to be open to any other offer.

That means they had decided from the start that 95% (at least , was it 97.5% before Coltrane sounded off) or 100% of the company was going to the lenders - regardless of the view of the owners.

So who were the directors representing ?

The lenders ?
Themselves ?
The workforce ?
The Clients ? As the post administration RNS seems to sycophantically be appealing to the clients that they can work more efficiently and at less cost "focused on improving our value propositions for customers"?

Or the owners - shareholders ?

Of course we all know the answer is NOT prioritising the shareholders.

Makes me wonder who appointed Debbie "Restoring Shareholder Value" White and the FD in the first place?

[oliversanvil] 16/3/2019 11:37

CN understands that the pre-pack sale to the lenders could only be stopped if a judge deems it unwarranted.

[dexdringle] 16/3/2019 11:36

Escapetohome. That's spooky. It almost like you have some kind of crystal ball. Oh, hang on, Interserve went bust YESTERDAY. Maybe no one has told you ?

[escapetohome] 16/3/2019 11:32

Con struction.

Dont dont go near it with your money.

Any of it.

[roger clark fca] 16/3/2019 11:17

In his speech to Parliament on 13 March 2019 the Chancellor announced that further action will be taken to tackle the issue of late payments by large businesses to small businesses. A full response to a call for evidence issued in 2018 will be published shortly. As a first step the Government will require Audit Committees to review payment practices and report on them in the Annual Accounts. There is an opportunity for firms like mine to gain work from this requirement. When I was chief internal auditor of the States of Guernsey, an audit of payment delay revealed 56 days delay while policy decreed 30 days. First of all, audit committees need to get their skates on and comply in good time with the proposed new requirements. I guess that penalties will be imposed for bad behavior and we all know that penalties grow like Topsy. It is likely that Interserve (IRV) (now de-listed on LSE) failed partly because of late payment by government and other customers.

[dexdringle] 16/3/2019 11:15

Coltrane us just a shareholder like anyone else with the exact same rights etc. Presumably, if he has a plan, it will benefit all shareholders if it works ?

[roger clark fca] 16/3/2019 10:56

Interserve may have failed because it was a victim of late payment

[kingston78] 16/3/2019 10:47

The Board of Directors have wasted hundreds of millions of pounds adopting the untested technology of Waste to Energy. This is fatal, just like the Boeing 737 Max 8.

New technology always has teething problems, and you don't want to be the guinea pig.

Incompetent directors and accountants did not foresee the scale of the looming problems. They have forgotten the idiom "make hay while the sun shines". The company should have raised funds from investors early on to repair the balance sheet, as Capita had done. Even Kier had done it late in a painful way because its rights issue flopped, but fully underwritten. I have mentioned about incompetent accountants because I have seen many. I don't know how they are trained nowadays. For example, Kier has announced that it has understated its group debt by many millions because the debt has been netted off against assets held for sale. The crux of the matter is that debt is real whereas the proposed disposal may not go through. You cannot net the two off to suppress the true picture.

Another example is the scale of the fraud at Valerie Patisserie, which is beginning to emerge, according to the press. Competent auditors and in-house accountants would have spotted it.

Wrong strategy is one factor but arrogance and ignorance is another. If directors run the company as if a family business like their own they would have adopted a different approach.

[diku] 16/3/2019 08:25

From the media...sad to see PI lose money...winners are the insiders...do they take any blame?...




Coltrane had put forward its own rival restructuring plan, which Barker told the meeting was not capable of being implemented.

Chris Baldock, 66, a retired small shareholder, told the Guardian he was “disgruntled” at how the company had been run.

“I was buying shares at £3 and they’ve gone down to 15p. I’ve lost about £12,000,”; he said, adding that the company’s management had been “overconfident”.

[thomstar] 16/3/2019 08:23

Yep FA I think with confidence in this sh1tty sector at all time low

[buywell3] 16/3/2019 04:24

So do existing shareholders get anything ?

I can't see where it says they do ... they could have shared 5% of the business

Looks to me like now they get sweet FA

[boffster] 16/3/2019 03:21

I can only guess that Coltrane decided that, having said they'd reject the deal, decided that they'd rather lose money than lose face. Wouldn't want to have to explain that one to their investors...

[dealy] 16/3/2019 00:35

If the proposed deal had gone through then the market value of the equity might have been 300m. Diluting Coltraine's stake by 95% would have valued it's stake at 3.5m GBP. Maybe Coletrain thinks a law suit will bring more? Hence dynamite the deal

[haz9] 15/3/2019 22:31

Don’t understand why Coltrane decided to wipe us and themselves out! Can anyone explain the logic - they have lost £7m!