- Fortress REIT released a webinar hosted by Bruce Whitfield, in which the directors and the company’s corporate advisor tried to deal with the issues (including the prickly ones) around Fortress’ proposal to collapse the dual-share structure into a single class. To save you the time of watching the webinar, I wrote on the key points and some of the controversial issues in this feature article.
- RECM and Calibre (RAC) shareholders will be receiving shares in Astoria, as RAC has resolved to unbundle 5,115,000 Astoria shares to RAC shareholders in the ratio of one Astoria share for every 10 RAC participating preference shares or ordinary shares. This eliminates the cross-holding between the companies and is a far better solution than a sale of Astoria in the open market, as the company is trading at a significant discount to net asset value. Separately, RAC released its results for the year ended March 2022. Although the net asset value fell by 32%, this can almost entirely be attributed to the previous unbundling of Astoria shares. RAC’s key investment is alternative gaming group Goldrush, which contributes 92.3% of RAC’s assets. Goldrush managed to achieve record EBITDA despite the challenges of Covid-related restrictions.
- Sephaku Holdings has released financials results for the year ended March 2022. Revenue and EBITDA increased at Metier, including EBITDA margin improving from 8.7% to 9.5%. At SepCem, EBITDA margin fell from 15.9% to 14.6%, offsetting the benefit of higher revenue. Metier is a wholly-owned subsidiary and contributed R30 million in profit after tax. SepCem is an associate of Sephaku (i.e. the listed company has a large minority stake) and equity-accounted profit attributable to Sephaku was R29 million.
- Just as Oando Plc started to catch up on outstanding financials, it seems as though the company may be leaving the market. Based on a court ruling driven by a petition from minority shareholders, Oando will need to make an offer to all minority shareholders (representing 42.63% of the shares in issue). Nigerian law was too niche for even the cruellest of examiners at Wits where I studied accounting, so I’m afraid that I can’t give you much more information on this.
- There seem to be some interesting governance changes at Eastern Platinum, the platinum group on the JSE that has strong Chinese shareholder influences. After some reshuffling of directors, the board is now completely independent from the executive management team. This is a good thing, provided you believe in prevailing corporate governance frameworks.
- African Equity Empowerment Investments (AEEI) has been in dispute with its bankers, Nedbank, over the bank’s intention to terminate the banking relationship. AEEI was granted an interim interdict in the Equality Court to prevent Nedbank from doing so. This is subject to final proceedings at the court, which AEEI notes will take a long time to conclude. In the meantime, the company has saved its bank accounts.
- Trustco has renewed its cautionary announcement based on the negotiation of a management services contract being entered into with Next Capital. Considering Trustco is late with its interim financial statements with no valid excuse given, I would just exercise caution in general when thinking about them.
- The CEO of Santova has bought shares in the company worth around R132k. This is lunch money as far as director dealings usually go on the JSE, but it’s still worth a mention to see a purchase coming from the man holding the steering wheel.
- It is common to see listed company directors exercising share options and then selling a portion of the shares to cover taxes, so I don’t bother mentioning these scenarios. I do want to highlight that the CFO of Industrials REIT exercised options and then sold the whole lot. The share price is down nearly 23% this year.
- A director of EPP, a subsidiary of Redefine, has bought shares in the company worth nearly R162k. This is the second recent purchase of shares by a director of the Eastern European subsidiary.
