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Haha - there are a few people in that book that I had dealings...

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    Haha - there are a few people in that book that I had dealings with back in the day. I never made any money back then though, I too young and stupid (now I'm just old).

    From "Dot Bomb Australia. How we wrangled, conned and argie-bargied our way into the new digital universe". Askew, Kate. Allen & Unwin 2011

    During this time of daring deals and chameleon-like corporations, every now and then there was a whisper of discontent,
    followed by accusations that these companies were vainglorious and lacking in substance. Yet substance was an overrated
    quality in a stockmarket boom like this, and company directors
    who found something for avaricious investors to get excited
    about—no matter what it was—were, it had to be said, just
    catering to their needs. Then there were those internet-style
    start-ups that had very good ideas, but ran out of the cash to live
    up to them

    The gold chain-laden Vladimir ‘Roger’ Nikolaenko had
    been mining the stockmarket for long enough to know a greedy
    investor. So when mining the internet offered better returns

    than digging in the Western Australian dirt, Nikolaenko was
    more than happy to oblige his investors. But Nikolaenko’s
    Nexus Minerals would have to wait until January 2000 for that
    opportunity.


    MTIC was a private Perth company run by three young
    technology gurus: Adrian Floate, Russell Miln and Andrew
    Mann. As Trevor Sykes, aka Pierpont, pointed out in the
    Australian Financial Review, they believed they had found a
    means of ensuring payments over the internet were secure.
    Nexus offered to buy MTIC for a forest of paper—about 20
    times its issued capital. And the technology wasn’t all Nexus
    bought—thrown into the deal was the 26-year-old Floate and
    his colleagues.

    Floate was important because he was even more upbeat
    than Nikolaenko. Nexus shareholders, whose stakes were
    being diluted beyond recognition, needed to hear good news,
    and that is what he gave them: the revamped Nexus was going
    to be a global leader in the e-commerce sector—no, make that a
    dominant global leader in the e-commerce sector.

    Nikolaenko was downbeat by comparison. He merely
    talked about Nexus in terms of it becoming Australia’s leading
    software company. But at least he said something, because that
    was about as much detail as investors were given to go on. Any
    real numbers were clearly a treat that had to remain locked in
    the pantry until after the deal had been done—a deal that could
    increase its share price by more than 20 times.

    And the technology was brilliant. It wasn’t relying on a
    simple website; it was offering security for all those people who
    wanted to use the World Wide Web. It used the so-called SET
    protocol established by Visa and MasterCard, which was apparently even more secure than the alternative SSL protocol which
    was widely in use.

    So Nexus moved to its next incarnation as IPT Systems.Sadly, there didn’t appear to be much of a system in reality—only months later, the market would decide the internet wasover as quickly as it had begun, and Nexus’s investment nolonger looked nearly as interesting. Its technology division,MTIC, was suddenly having difficulty finding the amount ofcash needed to fund its global ambitions.

    Nikolaenko, meanwhile, being a fl exible chap like many of
    these resources types, decided that digging dirt was, after all,
    more attractive than mining the internet. It paid
    $2 million for
    part of a mining plant from a company called Plato Mining. At
    least he could tell IPT (née Nexus) shareholders that he knew
    more than a thing or two about Plato—he had an interest in it.


    What followed was a sad but all-too-common tale of what
    can occur when a boom busts. Views differed on whether IPT
    ought to return to mining. Nikolaenko found his only two other
    board members unusually disagreeing with him. Approaching
    the end of 2000 MTIC—which was being run by its original
    team and had to ask for budgets to be approved and capital to be
    handed over, even though it was really a division of IPT—had
    run down its cash. Nikolaenko had no desire to spend any more
    money pursuing a global ideal with profi ts years away, which
    was hardly an attractive timetable for a fellow in a hurry.


    Facing no better choice than to call in the corporate undertaker, MTIC did just that. It appointed dot.com expert Ferrier
    Hodgson as its administrator. Not at all pleased, Nikolaenko
    decided he would rather put MTIC into receivership—in so
    doing he would at least preserve some sense of having control
    of his internet experiment. At the same time, he kicked out
    Floate as managing director. Just to make it clear how he
    felt, IPT then promised shareholders it would go to court to

    investigate the representations the MTIC people had made
    to Nexus back before the boom busted


    What Nikolaenko and IPT’s chairman Patrick Lyons
    hadn’t accounted for was the capacity of a 26-year-old to make
    a comeback. Floate, with the backing of just enough shareholders, decided he was going to rid IPT’s board of both Lyons
    and Nikolaenko. Nikolaenko, realising quickly that the tide
    was turning, exercised one of his greatest skills, his gift of the
    **, and did what the majority wanted—he paid all of MTIC’s
    creditors out. Everyone was happy. IPT agreed to pay Floate
    $250,000 annually for three years for services rendered. It also
    agreed to pay Nikolaenko
    $300,000 annually for five years
    (presumably the extra
    $50,000 was tacked on as a mark of
    his seniority, or perhaps it was for his fl exibility). MTIC was
    advanced
    $2 million for its internet endeavour.

    The deal wasn’t to last. One of the three MTIC founders,
    Russell Miln, engineered a board spill. The new board negotiated a truce with Nikolaenko, which saw him keep the deal to
    buy said mining plant and fl oat it off—but only temporarily.
    Nikolaenko and his deals were eventually seen off. The new
    board also reinvestigated the original MTIC deal. And in a rare
    win for companies that had bought assets at high prices in order
    to take advantage of the internet boom, it negotiated for Floate
    and Mann to hand back to the company all the shares they had
    received in return for selling their stake in MTIC—a total of
    about 67 million shares. Miln handed back one-third of his
    33 million-odd shares.


    But Miln stayed around to help run the technology business.
    IPT also bought the remaining 20 per cent of MTIC that it
    didn’t own for a mere
    $150,000, which was less than it paid for
    80 per cent of the company when the initial deal was struck.


 
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