Empiric Share Price (ESP)

You would be absolutely mad to approve the UNITE offer.

Our management need to be investigated for still supporting this deal.

I wonder if they are more interested in lining their pockets than safeguarding shareholder value?

This deal has destroyed shareholder value.

CRIMNAL DISGRACE.

Been looking at shares I once held, I noted the offer from Unite way back in June 24 of about 107p from recollection. i thought that with the esp sp at 79p what a bargain - until I dig deeper and find that the Unite share price has plummeted since and 79p reflects this. Shame on Unite, I would walk away from this deal personally

WALK AWAY FROM UNITE DEAL

- If management do not reverse their approval of Unite merger they need to be criminally investigated.

- the deal is awful: because of UNITE UTG awful operations and share price, as of writing the value of the offer in UTG and cash is 81.5p ... they can go to hell.

VOTE AGAINST THE DEAL

What an * fest this is turning into.

Due to London & South East's limit on the amount of text in a comment, I was unable to include the following in my comment on Friday 22 August:

- On Friday 22 August ESP opened below 92p, by 9am the spread was 92.3 to 92.4 and for most of the day it traded in a narrow range. From about 9:50 am to 3 pm from the spread was 92.7 to 92.8, the quantity bought was more than double the quantity sold.

- From about 3 pm the spread went progressivley higher through the gears via 92.8 to 93.0 to peak at 4:14 pm at 93.6 to 93.8. By then there were more sales in the mix but by the close, and ignoring the uncrossing trade and the trades which followed it, the number bought was still about double the number of shares sold.

- On Friday there were many individual purchase trades involving batches of 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 and 6,000 shares.

- Until Friday I hadn't seen such a trading pattern on any day since I bought ESP on 13 August.

- As I said in my 22 August comment, from about 3pm on Friday the bidder Unite [UTG], whose shares are oversold, began a fairly steep rise and closed up nicely but ESP were up even when UTG were down.

- My experience with other cash-and-shares bid situations in the last year or so (e.g. Aviva for Direct Line, and Greencore for Bakkavor) is that at this stage in the takeover process the target is usually sits at a discount of about 5% to the value implied by the bidder's share price, but for much of Friday ESP's mid-price at any given time was 98 to 99% of the value implied by UTG's share price at that time.

- Friday's closing price of 735.5 for UTG implies a value of 94.5175 for ESP. However, ESP closed at 93.7 which is 99.135% of the implied value, i.e. a miniscule discount of 0.865% to the implied value.

- Either UTG is about to get re-rated to reverse its oversold position and traders are buying both UTG and ESP in the hope of profiting from the re-rating, and/or there's another potential bidder sniffing around ESP. Of course if there's another bidder they might be prepared to offer more than UTG is prepared to pay, and if the market thinks that a counter-bidder is likely to succeed there's likely to be a reversal in whole of in part of UTG's share price drop of about 14% since their approach for ESP was annonced on 5 June.

- After being a few hundred pounds down on paper for most of the time since I bought ESP on 13 August, at Friday's close I was under £50 down.

Within the next couple of minutes I'm going to add a comment almost identical to this one to London & South East's chatboard for UTG.