Email from Ben Pauley below;
Dear AIC Mines Shareholders
I have received hundreds of emails of support, very strong support. The most common response is "I couldn't understand why the share price wasn't performing and I also suspected manipulation". There is no doubt among most of you that the share price is totally suppressed, not one person has doubted that while hundreds have agreed with it.
Ten years I have been doing this. A lot of failures. A lot of times I have written to the share registers and no-one is interested but this time it is very different. One thing I have realised is there are a lot of people who want to help but lack the confidence or think they don't have the knowledge or experience to help in any way. This is not true at all. The best help I have received in the past is from people with little or no experience, you can all make a difference. As you saw from my youtube video, I'm just a normal guy, I have very little financial training and very little geology training. So if I can achieve things then you certainly can too.
We want to shine a light on boards of directors that are not acting in the full interests of shareholders. How many of you recall the price rise to 60c then the capital raising then the fall to below 40c. I believe they are getting shareholders to fund AIC, then they are suppressing the price so Glencore can take it over. And I believe they have plans for that to happen soon and a lot of you agree with me. Another common reply I received from you - you sent me many examples of other companies where this has happened.
And lets not forget which company Aaron was a founder of the leadership team of - Evolution Mining. Are shareholders funding AIC for Glencore or Evolution? Which company are management planning to takeover AIC with, or is it both? Some complicated merger which nobody can understand the details of.
Thankyou also to the Demetallica shareholders who agreed with me, the same thing happened there first. Capital raising, price suppression, takeover. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat. I'm sorry to say Aaron and other directors, you do not deserve your remuneration when you let this happen to people.
No inner circles benefitting this time. Just Cloncurry's natural wealth being distributed amongst those smart enough to invest in it - the shareholders.
We should all be against the takeovers of small and medium sized companies by these larger companies. We know plans have been made to package AIC into a nice takeover target - and we intend to find out those details through a court action of preliminary discovery.
Banton Group are a candle among the darkness in the legal field. There is so much darkness in that field, lawyers usually only care about how much money they can extract from people who have already lost money to begin with. Paul from Banton's offers a price of $1500 for the legal letter sent to AIC directors for the following information.
1. The trading data on important dates around capital raisings, positive announcements and large copper price rises, where we have seen the most suppression of the share price.
2. All communication between AIC directors, Glencore, Evolution and AIC's brokers.
3. The beneficial owners who are in the top 20 shareholders within the custodial accounts who are definitely suppressing the share price.
4. If they are understating current or future profits.
5. A strong warning that if this information is not supplied in a timely manner then preliminary discovery will be immediately started. This is a step I have never seen before used in this way. This is a tactic developed by myself and Banton recently with Maronan to identify share price manipulation issues using the legal system rather than depend on the regulator. And it was successful in removing the main culprit - UBS.
It succeeded because they knew if I used the law to find who was within UBS then it would have been a related party to someone Maronan are in negotiations with. Everything is already planned, you need to know this. To know this means we can stop it, in both companies. They have plans involving the share price, what it needs to be contained at and they already have plans with who should take it over. This is the whole point of the discovery process. To show the world these plans so they have to change their plans. And to show how our wealth is being taken over Australia wide by big foreign companies that do deals with the directors of our smaller mining companies.
Actually I would like any accountants among you to go through the financials of the last annual report and red flag anything to me. The first red flag is that PWC are the auditors. If there was anyone who could hide profits on a balance sheet, it would be them.
I have already had some people offer to donate towards the legal costs. This is the only way I believe can stop what is happening. No ASIC will help, very few politicians will help (Senator Rennick the only exception who knows about our situation already), no journalist will help. Journalists will only publish a story when it goes to court. I believe taking it to court will be a big deal because it is the first time being tried.
$1500 is the cost to send the legal letter.
$10k-$15k is the cost of lodging court documents and proceeding with preliminary discovery. This cost is 'considerably higher' if the directors oppose us. I do not yet know how much considerably higher means. The following from Banton's is their suggestions on how to send the donations.
- Generally speaking, the most optimal legal structure for a crowdsourcing campaign would be a trust. However, the set-up costs are likely to exceed the cost of the initial letter and be disproportionate to the cost of preparing a preliminary discovery campaign.
- You may wish to consider a simple private agreement between donors and yourself under which you commit to apply their funds only to the legal costs of the AIC campaign.
However, under either option our strong preference is not to use Banton Group’s trust account to receive the donations, as it is a bit of an administrative nightmare for us as there are stringent obligations applicable to solicitor’s trust accounts. So the donations should be paid to you (as trustee for the AIC shareholder campaign), and then paid by you to our trust account. Another option might be to use a crowdsourcing platform if you feel that would provide enhanced credibility.
I am happy to accept the donations from you and pass on to Banton's.
A court case is a very drastic and serious step. This is for those of you who are fed up. If you just want to watch and not contribute financially, this is completely fine. Actually your letters are more important than any money. Quite a few have already started writing to some of the more alternative financial voices on social media. There are economists like Martin North who have popular youtube channels who are decent people who want the best for our country. Even Alan Kohler, a mainstream financial guy supports us. But people like Alan and Martin won't publicly support us until we put it on their radar.
I won't continue to ask for money like some people do. Just know that the opportunity to donate is there and I will inform you of the progress through email.
Now might also be the time to start an AIC whatsapp group so please let me know if you would like to join and I can create one and send you a link.
On a personal note. The last 10 years doing this sort of thing and the last year especially has been hard. Several times my marriage has been close to ending and it is still in a rocky situation. Every time my wife and I argue, it is about finances. ASX directors from most companies do not care about me and do not care about you. But the immense suffering that comes from losing money and losing money from dishonesty is hard to bear at times. I've suffered from migraines, I've suffered from insomnia, I've had angry outbursts at my children and none of this would have happened if ASX directors actually worked for the shareholders.
Sincerely
Ben Pauley
(20min delay)