We would love to hear your thoughts about our site and services, please take our survey here.
London South East prides itself on its community spirit, and in order to keep the chat section problem free, we ask all members to follow these simple rules. In these rules, we refer to ourselves as "we", "us", "our". The user of the website is referred to as "you" and "your".
By posting on our share chat boards you are agreeing to the following:
The IP address of all posts is recorded to aid in enforcing these conditions. As a user you agree to any information you have entered being stored in a database. You agree that we have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic or board at any time should we see fit. You agree that we have the right to remove any post without notice. You agree that we have the right to suspend your account without notice.
Please note some users may not behave properly and may post content that is misleading, untrue or offensive.
It is not possible for us to fully monitor all content all of the time but where we have actually received notice of any content that is potentially misleading, untrue, offensive, unlawful, infringes third party rights or is potentially in breach of these terms and conditions, then we will review such content, decide whether to remove it from this website and act accordingly.
Premium Members are members that have a premium subscription with London South East. You can subscribe here.
London South East does not endorse such members, and posts should not be construed as advice and represent the opinions of the authors, not those of London South East Ltd, or its affiliates.
Has anyone information ref. the latest RNS share purchase?
That's two large purchase's today! Must be positive news, I hope.
This can only be good news and a great time to top up. Looking forward now with no distractions and just getting on with the job to put value back into the business.
Good luck to the board and all the loyal share holders.
Convex sold at £13m loss.
Lionfish sold having incurred huge losses on just its first 4 cases.
Very large balance sheet write offs of WIP on historic contingent legal work.
The former management led by Nicola Foulston should hang their heads in shame. Appalling.
Tough medicine taken by new management team but didnt have any choice.
Like others have said - there might now be a take private/MBO of the remaining business. Could explain why Mr Ian Rosenblatt is stepping down from the board so quickly.
Bid Target? Where do you get that idea from? They haven't got this far to sell out and in a hostile TO the assets would all walk away. They are obviously throwing the baby out with bathwater this year when the results will be announced (end of April ish) and will start again from there. Depends if the market for legal services has picked as the trading update (18 Dec) suggested that Legal Servicees, esp Memery Crystal, were toughing it out in a slow second half of 2023. Good news is that with all the Foulston ideas now put to bed I am sure morale in the firm is soaring.
With the disposal of Convex this could be a bid target for someone. If not we have a simple legal services business with no distractions from paying down debt. It feels like good news, I hope the market sees it that way.
Aiming to raise £700,000 but unlikely to raise more than a few pence looking at the SP.
All Directors subscribing as of now - Retail Offer is not part of Placing and Subscription, and completion of the Subscription is not conditional on completion of Retail Offer.
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/LON:RBGP/RBG-Holdings-PLC/rns/1423158
Ian wants his money.
Placing at 9p .. not brilliant but better than most AIM companies
Mental debt here for a legal business of this size. The risks are obvious. I cannot see any reward in sight.
A long road to recovery here, if ever. No director buys even at this level is fairly damning.
Me too, I think there's life left in the dog.
Happy new year to us all!
Rightly or wrongly i have taken a punt on this.
If the bad news is out of the way, restructuring in hand and more importantly the big dog (Ian) is back to steady the ship and get it back on course. More upside long term than downside?
Famous last words..... :)
Why would you want to take such a gamble. The company owes over £20M at 8.3%. How long will it take to repay the debt? 5 years? Meanwhile there is unlikely to be any acquisitive growth, or much organic growth. What exactly would you be investing in? Only hope here is a take over, but given this type of business has little assets, it may be easier to just poach the people. Singer is predicting 4M Ebitda for 23, and 6M for 24, but you have to factor in the debt which is makes the enterprise valuation here 35M, so EV/Ebit is rather high = 8.75. I wouldnt touch this, but valuation wise it probably needs to half again to be appealing?
You also have a lot of Institutions who will probably dump this for above reasons, so expect valuation to be further depressed. Rosenblatt must curse the day he met Nichola.
I'm of the same opinion. If you assume that EBITDA remains static at £3.2 million per year then this is valued at less than 4 times EBITDA. Cash would all be absorbed by the loan repayments and interest, so no dividends, but if they succeed with any figures above this level the rerating could be 5x plus from here, or it could be zero.
This is a gamble and unfortunatly my punt money is tied up at the moment, else I would be tempted again.
I'm not sure if I should chuck some more cash at this or run for the exit. It does rather seem as if the new team is "kitchen sinking " everything they can so that in a couple of years there will be a big bounce in profits and no tax to pay. If they buy some shares then I will be tempted to follow suit.
I am tempted since I'm well in profit here from trading the covid bounce, I've been in and out recently but out when it just didn't feel right, I had a feeling something was up when it didn't bounce with conviction and my gut was right. The debt situation is the main concern but the bank have increased the facility recently by £3m, this is touch and go though and you could easily get a further rns in time saying they've broken the covenants, you could however just as easily get an rns saying they've received settlement on a legal case that they had previously written off (they wrote down several of these to 0 on their books in a recent rns), that might be a good time to buy.
Reading through, it sounds bad.
- decision has been taken to write off £1.8m of debtors and work in progress...restatement of the 2022 accounts.
- Costs relating to employment cases under the previous leadership team have been incurred (principally in the second half) totalling £1.9m.
- In addition, a further c. £0.2m was incurred during H2 in the run-down of another ABA.
So that is £4M down the drain before we start to look at the poor results, and lack current business.
Memery Crystal, has been impacted by the lack of activity in both Commercial Real Estate and Equity Capital Markets with transactions that were forecast in Q4 2023 either being delayed
Who would have thought that property and capital markets would be slowing down!
They had Net debt of £21.0m in June, so I would expect the recent facility to be close to maxed out - I am surprised they even managed to obtain it. I honestly think this is done for. One less legal on AIM wont be missed.
Meow
Really ? - Looks like a complete dog's dinner - in fact another of Simon Thompson's (IC) dinners. I'm glad (in this instance) I didn't follow his advice.
One to buy and tuck away for recovery
Yes - much better news
So the bank is happy and must have agreed a plan to ensure that the loan payments can be maintained over the next 2 years. There also appears to be some more good news to announce on the Convex side of things but not quite there yet.
Helpful comments if this was an insolvency situation, which it clearly isn’t.
I think the issue with Threeputt's comment below is that PLC's dont run existing loan facilities right up to the end of the term. It is almost always refinanced several months before the end of the term. And if RBGP's does run to only April 2024, it really should have been refinanced by now. If that is not possible, then one should go to an alternative. But that becomes a harder "sell" for the company, because the incumbent bank has already turned the opportunity down. One then gets into "alternative" lenders, who are just voracious sharks looking for 25%++
The one positive for them is the incumbent bank's security position: i havent looked at the numbers but they need to be sure that if they do pull the plug that they can get their money back. With a people based business that is a difficult proposition. The key will be whether the debtors cover the lending exposure and I would be looking for well over 100% cover. Maybe Memery Crystal can be sold back to management to raise funds ? Ditto the corporate finance business (I forget its name). Lionfish is just a big liability (and a terrible mistake by the former CEO). Then the Rosenblatt law firm will have some positive value as long as Ian Rosenblatt is involved (he is by far the key business winner there by all accounts). But - as ever in these insolvency situations, equity shareholders will be left with absolutely nothing.