Mercantile Ports & Logis... Share Discussion Threads

[mount teide] 15/9/2017 14:20

The mask finally slips away to reveal the true extent of what shareholders are going to see for £148m, including £49m of bank debt carrying interest of 13.5%:


'The Company's business development team, led by Mr Grover, continues to gain traction with new customers and the team is being set the target of 70% utilisation of the facility by the end of year 1, while at the same time using discretion in selecting customers/port users to maximise revenue and earnings.'

70% Utilisation of 200 acres is 140 acres of land ! (NOTE TO ALL SHAREHOLDERS MPL FAILED TO MENTION 200 ACRES BUT JUST THE FACILITY - IE WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO GET IS 70% OF WHAT THE SHYSTERS WILL HAVE RECLAIMED BY THE END OF THE YEAR!)

By the company's own admission they will have reclaimed JUST 90 to 100 acres of land by early 2018, and of that barely 50 acres will be available for operational use.

They had just £19m of cash left and £21m of headroom in the bank loan BY June 2017.

HOW DO THEY PROPOSE TO RECLAIM THE OTHER 100 ACRES OF LAND AND BUILD A LOGISTICS PARK BY THE END OF NEXT YEAR, THAT WILL SEE 140 ACRES OF THE FACILITY UNDER OPERATION? ANSWERS ON A POSTCARD TO THE UK AIM REGULATOR AND MUMBAI FRAUD SQUAD!

IT IS OF COURSE COMPLETE AND UTTER NONSENSE! TIP: ANYONE WHO SUPPORTED THE £37M PLACING AND OPEN OFFER SHOULD RE-READ THE ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION TOGETHER WITH THE IPO ADMISSION DOCUMENT BECAUSE AS WE PREDICTED LAST NOVEMBER:

What shareholders will see at best is GOING TO BE:

90 - 100 ACRES OF RECLAIMED LAND/HARDSTANDING

350m LIGHTWEIGHT OPEN JETTY - severely weather and tide affected

APPROACH CHANNEL DREDGED TO 3.5M AT BEST

MAIN ACCESS ROAD - A HEAVILY POTHOLED, UNLIT SINGLE LANE GRAVEL TRACK - LARGELY UNUSABLE DURING THE MONSOON SEASON FOR HEAVY COMMERCIAL VEHICLES.


AIOHO/DYOR

PS Interesting to note that the MMB have failed to uphold observance of their own Rules and Regulations! Puts into stark perspective why India was recently identified as the most corrupt Nation to do business in Asia.

[red army] 15/9/2017 12:00

Might be worth a short term punt on optimism until the crooks get found out at the end of the year?

[pj 1] 15/9/2017 10:30

Yes definitely. It's also worth remembering some trapped Bulls will be hoping for a spike to exit, so beware of any ramping

[marvelman] 15/9/2017 10:18

It would appear that some never learn the lessons their burnt fingers have shown them.

[waterloo01] 15/9/2017 10:03

SO for the next 5 years they will have to find around £10m a year just to pay back loan+ interest. As MT has suggested this will probably be more than the annual turnover in the 1st years, let alone profit.

By all means invest but do it with your eyes WIDE open. Any longer term holders will likely use this to exit.

[dave4545] 15/9/2017 10:00

max online buy 1000 shares £82.50 squeeze is coming

[waterloo01] 15/9/2017 09:52

Ploughing through the cash and very reassuring they say they can raise more if needed.
It will be. lol

The Company is confident of its ability to raise further funds to meet cost overruns, project enhancements or working capital requirements. The Company's financing effort to date is considered sufficient to enable the Company to fund all aspects of its operations"

Also note they didn't put in the interest due, just the principle repayments. Interest is already due and being paid and is more than the capital amount due in the 1st 5 years plus.

As at 31 December 2016, the Group's non-derivative financial liabilities have contractual maturities (and interest payments) as summarised below:


Principal payments Interest payments
================= ===================== ====================
Payment falling INR in INR in GBP000
due Crore GBP000 Crore
================= ========== ========= ========= =========
Within 1 year - - 50 5,952
1 to 5 year's 182 21,855 217 26,040
After 5 year's 298 35,658 69 8,294
---------- --------- --------- ---------
Total 480 57,513 336 40,286

[azalea] 15/9/2017 09:49

Interims
Ready for business by the end of this year and fully operational as early as possible.

[phowdo] 15/9/2017 09:37

Purchase of property, plant and equipment (21,750) (29,048) (58,555)

Chinny reckon...

[dave4545] 15/9/2017 09:35

maximum online buy is 5000 shares at 8p.

Perhaps as it looks increasingly like this project is real and not a scam and port will be operation as planned (star wars pun) the price could be ready for a serious
re-rating.

[pj 1] 09/9/2017 21:32

There is no borrow..I suspect that is confirmation of MT's summaries!

[mount teide] 09/9/2017 18:12

MRF - very prescient - when i originally wrote something similar to that in a post some three ago on another board - it had the UK Public Sector and Tethys Petroleum in place of the EU and MPL.

Sithuk - the Karanja approach channel has seen the 'dredged' depth reduced from an already highly restrictive 4.5m to 3.5m in the most recent communique to investors.

This will have a further hugely restrictive impact on the size and type of shipping capable of operating to the terminal - as covered in an earlier post, even small 4,000 dwt dry bulk coasters will be only able to access the terminal a few hours before High Water on spring tides and, on neap tides, there will be occasions when for days there may not be sufficient water in Karanja Creek to access the terminal at all - a totally ridiculous state of affairs.

Why have they done this? We believe it is to save circa £10m+ for 'spending' elsewhere.

Why did the two longstanding UK non execs not appreciate the commercial significance of this reduction to the depth of the 'dredged' access channel( there is no evidence the channel has been dredged at all other than directly off the berth), and hold management to account?

Both, despite running Port's in the UK do not hold any sea going Shipping Industry or Port Industry Professional Qualifications. As UK Master Mariners, my two friends and i hold the highest professional qualifications both industries currently examine for, and can each back it up with 30 years+ of senior level management experience.

DVI - as posted late last year, i was away from the boards for most of 2016, sailing around the Canary Islands and Western Med before returning to the UK via the French Canals in the Autumn. Prior to that had a number of very unsatisfactory telephone discussions and email/message correspondence(which i still have) with the CEO, that prompted us to sell out at a loss.

On returning to the UK, to find the MPL management stating they needed another £36m to complete the build-out was simply astonishing. My friends and I decided the least we could do was alert others as to what in our professional opinion is going on here, which we believe is totally unconscionable, and at the very least deserving of a thorough investigation by the AIM Regulator and SFO.

5 years ago we were not shareholders or even a prospective shareholders - the interest arose once the share price had fallen 80% prior to commencement of the build out, when the company still had circa 60 odd £million of cash on deposit.

Since then the management has been repeatedly exposed as liars, who have misled investors: in addition, the terminal specification has been changed out of all recognition for the worse, while the estimated build cost has ballooned by a massive 40% to a level that is completely implausible(its estimated cost is now identical to Adani Port's new deep sea container terminal which in our opinion has at least ten times the annual revenue earning potential!)


'I know there have been some changes in the spec but don't you realise that they had always planned to reorganise the debt in time. It is not as black and white as you seem to think. Yes, there is risk but there is also potential reward and I remain a patient long term investor and may well start adding again by the end of the year.'

Good luck! Before investing more of your money, I would respectfully suggest some research on small port terminals handling coasters, to get a feel for the commercial potential of such facilities.

In this respect Shoreham Port on the UK South Coast is a well managed break bulk, dry bulk and packaged timber Port Terminal, which handled 899 small ship calls last year, of an average vessel size identical to that expected to be handled at Karanja - Shoreham's latest Annual Accounts are in link below.



If that fails to clear the mists i suggest investing in a copy of Professor Greenspan's book!


AIOHO/DYOR

[sithuk] 09/9/2017 14:25

Dvi: if I follow MTs posts correctly, he is saying there is no business here because the approach channel cannot be dredged at an affordable cost to facilitate the ship traffic to make the port economic. Is that not the case?

[deepvalueinvestor] 09/9/2017 13:39

MT - I must confess to being mystified as to why you were utterly silent for almost a year when the price was dropping from 80p but now seem to be such a vocal opponent when you have lost some money and are no longer an investor. The debt level and interest is nothing new so why didn't you raise this 5 years ago? I know there have been some changes in the spec but don't you realise that they had always planned to reorganise the debt in time. It is not as black and white as you seem to think. Yes, there is risk but there is also potential reward and I remain a patient long term investor and may well start adding again by the end of the year.

[my retirement fund] 09/9/2017 13:17

Sounda like the UKs MPs and its public servants then!

[mount teide] 09/9/2017 12:33

The EU is generally characterised by a complete lack of management accountability, extremely modest performance/service delivery, nobody hardly ever getting sacked at any level regardless as to performance, operational timelines and performance targets rarely if ever met, very high operating costs, development projects that always come in late, massively over budget and that are riddled with endemic corruption.

What's the difference between this and MPL's management performance over the last 7 years? Answers on a postcard to Nikhail Gandhi c/o his $1,000 a day Private Suite, The Taj Mahal, Mumbai.

[mount teide] 08/9/2017 09:29

PJ1 - lol !

Probably Prof Greenspan, AIM Regulation or the SFO!

Cenkos has for weeks been trying to control both the bid and offer side of the book - i wonder why?

There are few things in life which are 100% certainties - but this completely implausible £148m build cost port never earning sufficient profit to pay the interest on the bank debt as it falls due, never mind any of the loan capital is a 100% certainty.

We do not have any doubt whatsoever this will be the outcome, as its as certain as night following day to anyone with long first hand experience of the industry.

It does not matter what volume of barge and coaster traffic is handled at the terminal, the handling rates for this type of cargo CANNOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES support a terminal with a build cost of £148m, carrying £49m of bank debt with 13.5% interest.

For instance in laymen's terms - if Wembley football stadium has 100,000 seats capable of achieving £10 of revenue a year at maximum utilisation, its maximum earning capability would be £1m a year. If its operating costs were the industry standard of £0.5m, the maximum possible gross profit is £0.5m.

Think of Karanja as Wembley in the above example but requiring a gross profit of £2m just to pay the interest on the debt and capital repayments annually.

The port would look like it's bursting at the seams, with everyone run off their feet - but its a complete illusion commercially - everyone is wasting their time, because they are achieving nothing other than delaying the inevitable of running out of money - they have the astonishing sum of circa £96m of interest and debt to pay back over the next 7 years or so - completely impossible for a small severely draft and weather restricted barge and coaster terminal designed to handle low revenue generating break bulk and dry bulk cargo.

Consider the Port of Dover, Europe's largest short sea port handling up to 100 ferries, container ships, cruise ships, fridge ships and dry bulk coasters a day - even their results during the last 5 years would have been incapable of paying the interest on MPL's debt and Capital repayments as they fell due without dipping into their cash reserves.

And to compare Dover with Karanja, is like comparing a pro golfer to an amateur hacker incapable of breaking 120 on a good day!

AIMHO/DYOR


And don't forget MPL management has NEVER come even remotely close to achieving a single operational of financial/budget target in the 7 years since IPO - the biggest red flag of all - a Bengal tiger never changes its stripes.

And that's before we even consider what in our opinion is the huge scandal of the alleged cash burn - some 4 Brinks Matt heists more than what we believe it should have cost for what shareholders will see for their money and the bank debt before the money again runs out - AS IT IS CERTAIN TO !

[pj 1] 08/9/2017 08:30

Is that you buying MT? LOL

[dave4545] 07/9/2017 19:48

6.75-7.5p at time of trade below

Somebody paid 7.95p for 476,943

[mount teide] 07/9/2017 19:39

On 10th December 2010 Professor Stephen Greenspan PhD, held the first copy of his new book 'Annals of Gullibility' in his hand.

The foreword:

'Gullibility, namely being duped or manipulated by one or more other people, is a very common form of social incompetence, and one that can have very serious consequences for the victim. Yet this phenomenon has been very much ignored by psychologists and other scholars. ANNALS OF GULLIBILITY is the first of several books that I hope will contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary field of "Gullibility Studies". This book, aimed at a general audience, explores a variety of stories, taken from finance, literature or from real life. These stories detail the many ways in which overly-trusting people have been duped. My hope is that these stories will contribute to an understanding of a puzzling phenomenon, namely why people, sometimes of high intelligence and education, are duped.

Gullibility is a topic to which most people can relate. All of us have been duped on occasion by someone whom we trusted, and we all know people whose extreme gullibility has gotten them into serious difficulty. Yet the small scholarly literature on gullibility exists mostly in professional journals. Attention to gullibility has been mainly by writers of fiction, where a number of great plays and novels have taken gullibility as a central theme.

The bulk of the book is taken up with stories depicting various forms of gullibility: financial, religious, political etc. The last two chapters discusses the various factors that contribute to gullibility, and things that people can do to protect themselves and others from being duped.

Believe it or not, this book is the first comprehensive book in English that addresses this important, universal and overlooked aspect of human incompetence. Here is what one very distinguished author, Michael Shermer had to say about this book:

"Stephen Greenspan has penned the definitive book on why people are gullible. He reveals why so many people are so gullible, the psychology that drives gullible behaviors, and most importantly what we can do about it. Annals of Gullibility belongs on the bookshelf of skeptics and scientists, not to mention politicians and policy analysts." '


Two day later on 12th December 2010, Professor Greenspan received a telephone call to advise him he had lost $400,000 in the Madoff Ponzi Scheme.

[azalea] 05/9/2017 15:43

Polly Peck boss who fiddled the company accounts and fled to N. Cyprus whilst awaiting trial/sentencing(cant remember which) came back and did a number of years in prison.

If a company is listed on Aim or Main the FSA should be investigating any complaints of fraudulent activity reported to them.

[pj 1] 05/9/2017 11:52

azalea
5 Sep '17 - 11:19 - 828 of 830    0   0
Unless i have missed the event of the Exec Chairman being fined or sent to jail by a court, all these allegations have yet to be proven?
=====================================================================================
Neither have the BoD of Globo, SID,QPP, TCM,AVO, African Potash, ADL, and others I have forgotten.

It can take over 5 years for the SFO to obtain all the information required. Sadly Directors under investigation are still allowed to ply their trade!! e.g. Rob Terry

[mount teide] 05/9/2017 11:41

Azalea - according to latest research, India is the most corrupt country in Asia, and apparently the Market regulator prefers to deal with criminal offences such as Insider Trading, not by huge fines or imprisonment but OUT OF COURT NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENTS.

It probably goes something like this:

"Now sir, you have been caught bang to rights committing insider trading. Although this offence would usually attract a hefty fine or imprisonment, in YOUR case i am able to offer a little flexibility. In return for generously writing out a cheque for my daughters school fees for the next 5 years at the new British staffed Eton franchised Taj Mahal Independent school, i can reduce your fine which would have been £XXXXXX to just £XXX"

Insider trader writes out personal/company cheque and hands it to the market regulator official

"So nice doing 'business' with you sir - i'll pop the small invoice for the fine in the post"

AIOHO/DYOR


Why is it overwhelmingly males that carry out white collar crime ?

[mount teide] 05/9/2017 11:24

MPL Annual Report - June 2017:

'In November 2016, we were successful in raising £36 million of equity funding, supported by both existing and new investors.

During the year, the Company made progress on site across all work streams and, as at 31 December 2016, the Group had cash resources of £35.69 million with a subscription commitment of £3million which was received in January. There was approximately£25million still available for drawdown at the year-end under the Company's banking facilities.'

So, WITHOUT the £37m Placing and Open Offer, by Dec 2016, MPL WOULD HAVE BEEN OUT OF CASH COMPLETELY WITH JUST £25M OF BANK DEBT FOR DRAWDOWN LEFT and HAD COMPLETED THE LAYING OF RECLAMATION MATERIAL ON JUST 37% OF THE LAND TO BE RECLAIMED AND HAD LAID JUST CIRCA 100 SHALLOW WATER BERTH PILES!

Looks like our forecast from last year that all shareholders will see once the £148m of cash AND BANK DEBT CARRYING 13.5% INTEREST runs out, IS NOT THE 200 ACRES OF PORT DEVELOPMENT AND LOGISTICS PARK SERVICED BY A 1,000M FIXED ALL WEATHER QUAY THAT WAS IN THE 2013 ARDEN NOTE, AND ON THE COMPANY WEBSITE UNTIL MANAGEMENT WERE RECENTLY FORCED TO REMOVE FOLLOWING A COMPLAINT TO THE NOMAD BUT, around 100 acres of reclaimed land and a 350m weather affected, lightweight, open barge and coaster jetty 'serviced' via an access channel 'dredged' to just 3.5m on the sea side and a heavily potholed, unlit, single lane dirt track on the landward side, that routinely floods and has parts of it wash away during the monsoon season. A facility that could be built for comfortably less than the £49m bank debt which has a lien over it, and is probably worth barely half that on the open market in a fire-sale.

How did they get away with it?

Answers on a postcard to the Nomad, AIM Regulation and the SFA.

AIOHO/DYOR