Malcy’s Blog
a fair summary ...
Far Limited- A FARce starring Remus…
Fasten your seatbelts as this story takes a fair bit of believing, I’m not planning to go through the history as it’s been in the blog a fair bit recently but this should be the end of Remus as a suitor for anything with its reputation in tatters.
The ‘bid’ for Far from Remus had led to a meeting last week at which shareholders had to decide the future of the company, with 20:20 hindsight the fact that Remus got so close and embarrassed Far is little short of a disgrace.
‘FAR refers to its ASX announcement dated 14 April 2021 which attached a letter from Remus Horizons PCC Limited as requested by it advising its intention to make a takeover offer for FAR shares at 2.1 cents per share.
Remus stated in that letter that Remus was proceeding to finalise its Bidder’s Statement so that it would be lodged by no later than 28 April 2021. An adjournment of the shareholder meeting until 10am on 28 April 2021 was proposed and supported by FAR shareholders in order to give Remus time to lodge its Bidder’s Statement.
Overnight, FAR has received 2 further letters from Remus:
1. In the first further letter from Remus, Remus states that it is unable to lodge its Bidder’s Statement over coming days. Remus states that this is because it has recently had its registration as a private investment fund suspended by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission.
2. In the second further letter authored by a different Remus signatory, Remus states that the intended takeover offer was not properly authorised by Remus, that Remus does not have the funding to complete the takeover offer, that the takeover offer intention letter issued by Remus contained a number of factual inaccuracies, and that the Remus Board would not approve a Bidder’s Statement.
In these circumstances, it seems clear that the proposed Remus takeover offer won’t be proceeding.
This shows that the Far management had tried to do everything that they could to put up with what was clearly a company not entirely in control of what it was saying to Far or the market.
This of course won’t come as a surprise to blog readers as we had quite a scoop published only last week in which we broke the news that the Remus fund had been de-registered by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission and therefore wasn’t able to make a bid. This would corroborate point 1. above re the GFSC and someone at Remus wrote to Far to tell them.
But then who wrote the second letter? Given that after the departure of most of the Remus staff (I’ve heard at least 15 out of 20) there aren’t many names to point to and it was someone who was prepared to own up to having insufficient funding, the takeover offer intention letter ‘contained a number of factual inaccuracies’ and would not be approved by the board. So what on earth is going on behind the scenes at Remus, maybe we should be told? Maybe the letter came from a less than gruntled former contractor who was peeved that they could be run roughshod over..?
Now I’ve been in this market for over 40 years and seen plenty of marginal bid situations in that time. I think I would have remembered if something this strange had happened and given what I understand of the 15 staff who have recently left without pay and rations we have more to hear from this tawdry episode…
(20min delay)
