Venture Egg Impact on Sequoia, page-8

Firstly this wasn't a termination payment - Page 4 of the AFS 2023 - Then go back to 2022 update -23 Nov 2022. The number seems to move around but the business update states that its a client remediation payment against an advisor who was terminated in 2019 of approximately $2.5 million and they expensed it. This is no termination payment its a settlement for remediation I presume of a client as a result of advise given by an advisor who was terminated in 2019. Its one of the things I dislike about SEQ. We have a bad year and it seems to wash all the issues out that year so we can reset. 2023 was a bad year in my opinion with the exclusion of the sale of Morrisons ...

To date I cannot see a recovery from the Insurer. Its now 2024...I looked as I had high hopes for 2023 and this number crashed it.

On page 74 of the financial statement of 2023 they refer to contingent liabilities and refer to their legal council is dealing with several matters referred to AFCA. They even refer to accruing the expenses related to a likely award and related legal costs. The statements don't quantify but I would assume that if it was a small immaterial amount they would have disclosed the quantum of the disputes or their assessment of the outcomes in aggregate. By the way if an advisor was terminated for advise in 2019 and there was a large AFCA process at what point should this have been disclosed to shareholders? I would have thought it would have been before the award was made and SEQ obviously settled. I am surprised that it wasn't noted in the AFS in previous years save for the fluffy contingent liability note which was the same as the previous year.

The insurance cost for 2023 was over $1 million. That actually shocked me as I remember that all risks policies were presumed to be expensive at 1% and their turnover was disclosed as $99,162,168 - That's on page 44 of said financial statements. However in this type of business the fees paid for working under your AFSL seem to be pretty low in regard to the risk you are carrying. One of the ancillary reasons we became uncomfortable with our investment.

There is a lot more I can go into - For example page 55 the continuation of note 13 Derivative financial instruments - Where it seems they offer clients a product structured as a loan which they then hedge their ( I presume liability) with exact like for like commercially available products. I tried to get my head around that - I used to receive these offers regularly from SEQ but what it looked like was they sold something that they had to pay to "clients / investors? at some point for which to service that they had to rely on other financial institutions products..

Overall these are the events that led up to our re-evaluation:

The Placement to SARGON, the subsequent failure of SARGON and OneVue attached the SEQ shares as SARGON failed to settle the acquisition of part of One Vue. The Sargon shares became an overhang when One Vue sought to sell them and these shares were acquired by various parties of which we were one.

SEQ acquired Share Cafe - Do your own research as to that.

Then the one thing I admit I was totally wrong about - Morrisons SEQ sold something I could not personally create a valuation above $30 million and they got more than that and still held or maybe still to date hold 20%. Great offload but what are the Morrisons shares worth now that Beaconsfield has taken control of New Quantum - " US-based investment manager Beaconsfield Capital has appointed McGrathNicol as receivers and managers to New Quantum Holdings, a non-trading holding company with operating subsidiaries including wealth management software platform New Quantum and options broker Morrison Securities."

Unless you have a watertight shareholders agreement a minority could in fact be entitled to zip if no dividends are paid. I have no knowledge of what is in place so cannot comment but its just another uncomfortable event.

Then the 249D shareholders meeting with some unhappy shareholders who got beaten. By the way who thinks its unwise to fight with shareholders publicly - especially when as a collective they own above 25%. However the Company really busted all records in getting a huge vote for existing directors. That was an amazing result. We were long gone before the 249D.By the way this is the second 249D there was one in 2019 if memory serves.

Now we have Venture EGG - I see you don't dispute that the AFSL used by Venture Egg is Interpracs? Its actually listed at the bottom of their ( Venture EGG) webpage.

A lot of events in a very small time space