Siimon leaps back out from his boxDate June 5, 2013 (1) Read...

Siimon leaps back out from his box
Date June 5, 2013 (1) Read later Ben Butler
Ben Butler
Business reporter

Legendary adman Siimon ''The Grim Reaper'' Reynolds is to make his triumphant return as a director of an ASX-listed company when, if all goes to plan, telco Inabox Group lists at the end of the month.

The Photon Group founder has signed on as chairman of Inabox, which wholesales telco services to boutique operators, in return for a modest stipend of $100,000 a year.

That's great value at just an eighth of Inabox's 2012 profit of $800,000. By way of comparison, the chairman of the $47 billion Australian Super fund, currently Heather Ridout, gets about $161,000.

Reynolds' tidy package also indicates Telstra chairman Catherine Livingstone is terribly underpaid. His pay is about 0.22 per cent of Inabox's $45.7 million revenue for 2012, and applying the same ratio to Telstra's mammoth takings indicates Livingstone should be on $50 million a year. She gets a miserly $684,000.

Advertisement Let's hope Inabox does better than Photon, which in 2010 nearly tumbled like one of the people slain by the reaper in Reynolds' famous '80s AIDS ad - except in Photon's case it was escaping not a bowling ball but $450 million in debt. Of course, by then, Reynolds had been out of the company for three years, having moved on to a second career as a self-help guru.

Back to Inabox, which is trying to sell 17 per cent of the company to punters for $2.9 million, valuing it at $16.2 million.

According to the prospectus, profit for the first half of the 2013 financial year was a bumper $1 million - but the company warned that because of ''seasonality and other factors, including an increase in staff numbers'', the second half ''is unlikely to produce the same level of profitability''.

And as of December 31, liabilities outweighed assets by $2.5 million.

If punters put up $2.9 million that would fill the hole nicely. Except, of course, for the entirely reasonable $700,000 - a quarter of the money - in fund-raising costs that is to be paid to sponsoring broker Shaw Stockbroking, investigating accountants Ernst & Young and others.

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