I sat down with Roby and his operations manager at La Petite Cafe in Ljubljana on Wednesday for 90 minutes and grilled him over many things. Roby had an orange juice, the Op manager had a coffee, I ordered a large beer. They also had a toasted sandwich on the table. They shared the sandwich, it had cheese in it. I ordered one with ham because I didn't want to share.
I wasn't a shareholder two weeks ago but bought $500 worth of shares to justify the conversation.
I let him know I was Tronbirk, a long time critic of the company, was disappointed but somehow a little relieved that he didn't read HotCopper. He would however have seen my quote on the Ross Smith FB page.
I'm not going to bother writing about much but I'm less sceptical about the company than I once was.
He told me a couple of things that I'll share. I asked about VC and he said they had a bank statement from the company before signing the deal. I can't remeber exactly how much it was but I thought he said $190million. Don't quote me on that! It was definitely enough though. I asked why VC would sign such a deal in the first place when they didn't have to and he said they're a business that sells a lot of the product, they loved the derma range and wanted to lock it in for the future. He said they can verify with the ASX.
I asked about the $60mill offtake agreement and the ownership of Natura d.o.o.. He said the guy Tsvi Moalem is also the owner in Israel and Dr Burnstein is a big company. He said the registered address was the small house (a business partner here) but they have a building in the industrial zone in Grosuple and if I went there I'd see that it is a real business with trucks coming and going. He said that sometimes Israeli companies want to get out of Israel because some people don't like to do business with Israelis.
I asked about Cannaglobal and who were the owners and what 10% meant. He said that it's run by Lorne and the other guy who are guns, he went through their resumes for me. I asked again what 10% was and he said they've got other companies in the fold which are all taking a percentage, one for instance is a chewing gum (I can't remember if I was allowed to say that). He said he couldn't tell me the others at this stage. He said that the Derma division was just going to suck them dry and these Canadians were connected and great salesmen.
Make of this what you will.
I want to see how the performance shares play out.
My sentiment is a hold but like I said I only own $500 worth.
Lep Pozdrav
Tronbirk
(20min delay)