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.
The Times article on Sirius Minerals of today, Thur 20 Feb 2020 stated that Ordinary Shareholders hold 50% of the shares. 75% vote needed.
I particularly liked the suggestion that Polygone joined forces with Odey ???
Trouble is I want funding not one and a half extra pennies
That's Two articles in the Business pages so someone thinks it's getting interesting ??
www.fundsirius.com
Mr Steel is now teasing Anglo, claiming it would make its bid “final” if it wasn’t leaving room for a bump. Anglo says that’s simply tactical: keen to avoid Apollo’s woes over plastic maker RPC, where its “final” offer was gazumped by a last-minute interloper. But say another Sirius investor, Polygon, which has built a 9.83 per cent stake via CFDs, joined Odey in pushing for Anglo to dig deeper. Convert their holdings to voting stakes, add some disaffected retail punters and Anglo could have a problem. True, the risk is that a failed bid tips Sirius into bankruptcy, so wiping out the shareholders — potentially allowing Anglo to buy the business from the administrators. But Mr Cutifani would prefer to avoid that mess. This bid’s not over yet.
A
Hedge your bets over Sirius bid
Alistair Osborne
Thursday February 20 2020, 12.01am, The Times
Share
Save
Crispin Odey is known for many things: being the Brexiteer hedge fund supremo who shorted the pound; sharing a reputed £775 million fortune with his investment manager wife Nichola Pease; having a car-crash bet against Tesla shares.
But becoming the new best friend of 85,000 retail punters, deep in the fertiliser at Sirius Minerals? What, Mayfair hedgie Crispin? You cannot be Sirius. Well, think again, because that’s precisely the impression Odey Asset Management wants to give with its spot of “bumpitrage” at the Woodsmith mine.
Odey’s just taken a 1.29 per cent stake in Sirius, mainly via contracts for difference: the cue for announcing that Anglo-American’s £405 million rescue bid “does not represent fair value” for investors. It finds the 5.5p-a-share offer “unjust”, reckoning 7p-plus would be nearer the mark: a point made in a letter to Anglo boss Mark Cutifani and Sirius chief Chris Fraser. And, yes, it’s a bit late for Mr Odey to have discovered the pretty money pit on the North York Moors. But, as noted here on Saturday, here was a situation ripe for hedgie brinkmanship.
IN YOUR INBOX
Your daily Business Briefing
Keep up to date by getting our Times Business Briefing newsletter straight to your inbox at 8am and lunchtime
Sign up now
The deal is via a scheme of arrangement, with the vote on March 3. And, as the prospectus makes clear, for the bid to go through it requires “the approval of the majority in number” of voting shareholders “representing not less than 75 per cent in value” of the votes. Retail shareholders own half the stock. And, even allowing for much of that being via platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown, for this bid they have unusual clout.
To boot, some are so livid with Mr Fraser for enticing them down the mine at as much as 40p a share that they’ve vowed to vote the deal down to spite him. His response? That if they do, Sirius will go bust. Similarly, Mr Cutifani insists he will not be raising his bid: every 1p on the price adds $100 million to Anglo’s bill. Neither are Sirius shares signalling a bump: a below-offer 5.12p. And why should he be worried about Odey? It actually owns just 0.21 per cent.
Still, with two weeks to go to the vote, you’d expect them to say that. And Odey does have form. Its letter was written by Henry Steel, famous for his rancorous exit from Rio Tinto. He departed nicely clued up on its Oyu Tolgoi mine project in Mongolia: info he used at Odey to successfully short the shares of the Canadian-listed vehicle, Turquoise Hill, via which Rio held its stake in the mine. He also banded together with other hedgies to force Barrick Gold to up its bid for Acacia Mining.
Mr Steel is now teasing Anglo, claiming it would make its bid “final” if it wasn’t leaving room for a bump. Anglo says that’s simply tactical: keen to avoid Apollo’s woes over plastic maker RPC, where
Some retail investors have suggested that they are willing to lose everything to spite Sirius management, while others are desperately seeking to find alternative solutions. These include a group running a Fund Sirius campaign to try to demonstrate to the company that the £460 million it needs for the next stage of the project could be raised in the market through a bond issue. Yashmin Ismail, the group’s founder, said that this week it had secured expressions of interest from people willing to put in about £9 million.
Doubts over Anglo American’s £405 million takeover of Sirius Minerals have deepened after the hedge fund run by Crispin Odey opposed the deal.
Odey Asset Management said that Anglo’s 5.5p-a-share offer “does not represent fair value for shareholders in Sirius” and claimed that the FTSE 100 mining group “would be willing to bid substantially more” for the North Yorkshire fertiliser mine developer.
The fund said that it had acquired a 1.3 per cent economic interest in Sirius this week and would vote against Anglo’s offer unless it was declared “final”. In an attempt to elicit a better offer, it committed to vote in favour of any bid priced at 7p a share or higher.
Crispin Odey is hoping to encourage a higher offer for Sirius
REX FEATURES
The intervention from Odey is deeply unhelpful for bosses at both companies as they try to convince furious shareholders in Sirius, including tens of thousands of retail investors who are facing heavy losses, that the deal is the only option to prevent bankruptcy. Anglo’s offer will be put to shareholders at a vote on March 3, when it must secure a majority by number of those voting and 75 per cent by value.
Sirius is developing the Woodsmith mine near Whitby to extract polyhalite from a mile beneath the North York Moors National Park. The company recommended the takeover from Anglo — despite what Chris Fraser, its chief executive, admitted was a “disappointing” price — after failing to secure funding to complete the project itself.
Anglo, which today is expected to report annual earnings of $10 billion, is one of the world’s biggest mining groups, with interests ranging from copper to diamonds. Crispin Odey, a Tory donor and Brexiteer, is famed for betting on a crash in the pound after the Brexit referendum and is understood to be nursing heavy losses from shorting Tesla. His portfolio manager leading the intervention into the Sirius deal is Henry Steel, a former Rio Tinto employee who has since shorted one of Rio’s biggest projects.
Odey’s move appears to rest on a gamble that Anglo will not be prepared to let the deal fail and will buy Sirius out of administration instead, given that this could introduce uncertainty into its acquisition of what it has described as a “world-class” mining project.
The vote is made more unpredictable by a volatile Sirius shareholder register. The company had 85,000 retail investors as of December 2018, but it is not known how many remain, nor how many of those that hold their shares through investment platforms will opt to exercise voting rights.
Sirius yesterday reiterated that it faced a “stark choice” with a “high probability” that it would be placed into administration if the takeover failed.
Some retail investors have suggested that they are willing to lose everything to spite Sirius management, while others are desperately seeking to find alternative solutions. These include a group running a Fund Sirius campaign to try to demonstrate to the c