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Red, correct. So now you agree that's why Fosun is part of a different proposal where they are not buying a majority of the shares of TCG. Which essentially means he's not buying a majority stake either as he can't.
Red, so how is he going to own over 50% of an EU airline? Apparently you have a solution for that.
With Fosun holding 18% and some other non-EU holders holding some more his limit will be reached soon enough. If he wants to single handledly stop whatever comes up he needs 25% which is possible only if aside from Fosun there's currently less than 7% in non EU hands. Otherwise TC will be forced to assure voting rights are restricted or the airlines will be an issue.
What he needs urgently is EU partners and a semblance of a counter offer to what is currently on the table. The balance sheet hasn't changed nor have the rules.
Anyone in the trade who reads "with the skillset and complementary capabilities Anex Tour shall put forward" will want part of whatever he's smoking.
There's a Turkish-Russian link here with the JV that TCG set up with Sarpedon Travel so they could buy Biblio Globus. That's recent and has definitely affected him and Anex and no doubt it would be interesting for him to get some leverage there in order to get a bigger share of the Russian market. His chances in Western Europe? Just look at how Anex performs in Germany and you will know enough.
1) He was registered in old British firms as being Turkish, the chances he has an additional EU nationality seem slim, those don't really drop from the sky if you're not living in the EU.
2) Being mentioned as a well established business man isn't exactly the same as being a billionaire
3) Whether Anex is a GMBH or not doesn't matter. As stated: He can not own an EU airline INDIRECTLY. So if he owns the majority of Anex and Anex owns an EU airline then it is still not ok. If it was ok why do you think Fosun is not allowed to control the airline? Club Med SAS is French so if we follow your logic they can own an airline.
Azur Air Germany did get an AOC and it isn't entirely clear how the ownership worked but it wasn't exactly a shining example of business mastery either given it was an utter failure and shuttered quite quickly. If it had been bigger and the ownership structure was questionable the AOC would get challenged by competitors. In this particular case I'm sure they didn't really care and were ok with seeing it crash and burn in less than 2 years.
Plenty of people here claim he's a billionaire but I don't really see where they get the idea from.
Also for anyone who thinks he wants the airline: he's not European, he can not own the airline. The idea that he has companies in EU countries is entirely unrelated. He's not allowed to be a direct nor an indirect majority holder of a European airline.
If he really is planning to battle it out with Fosun then he needs allies. If he doesn't have allies he'll get burned. I'm interested in seeing what his play exactly is but very little of the ideas floated here make sense.
PF didn't get a bonus for 2018. To add to the irony: he bought 50k£ in shares at 29p.
Paul, I am not a shorter. On the contrary I lost quite a bit of money here. Though I immediately sold on that Friday morning cause at such a point in time it is 100% guaranteed to drop. Even if you think it can be saved there's really 0 reason not to sell on such an announcement. Anyone who sold immediately could use the exact same money now to get a lot more shares if they considered the dust has settled and there was a reason to think it is at a price equivalent to what the diluted share value will be. Personally I think it isn't there yet and needs to be lower still before a buy in is an interesting gamble.
But all the ideas around court cases, fraud ... are just insane. It isn't supported by facts and we all knew all along it was a gamble given the debt pile. I initially thought they would manage to sell the airline but with that option gone there's really nothing left to do except for that D4E.
Why would anyone from the BOD bother to go to Peterborough rather than the London office? Peterborough is UK HQ, not Thomas Cook Group HQ. It is about as sensible as staking out their local HQ in Frankfurt.
Anyone who thinks there's anything strange about it: the initial bids were all non-binding bids. That includes the bid for the Nordics (which I guess would have been for Nordics tour ops and airline). Those will have been ok so TCG said they had multiple bids and it looked good. Then you sit at the table with them and they all start crying how the market is bad and how it is getting worse and how they can only make lowered binding bids. At the end of the day you add it all up and the result is below what you needed so you drop it and look for a different solution.
Chances of that being called fraud or corruption: 0
PF's office is indeed in London. I can't imagine he's not welcome there, I'll have a listen but I would say anyone working there is smart enough to know what investing is about. As has been pointed out I doubt his personal interests are going to be served massively by this either, he would've been better of with this going to 1£ giving he's sitting on 4M in shares. If you honestly believe people's personal preference is massively at play you should just blame Sten Daugaard. At least that sounds somewhat plausible given he only recently moved into the CFO position so if this would be really a story of international intrigue then he'd be the mole. It was supposedly also him who made the call on writing off the goodwill which in itself is an entirely non consequential operation but ever since everyone is yapping about the massive "loss" they are making this year. So hey, maybe he did it on purpose?
Obviously in reality it's just all sour grapes from people who have lost money. I can understand that. I lost money too and also thought this could've been resolved differently but once you make the decision to not care about the shareholders you're past the point where there's going to be better solutions that do care about them. You'd be just giving up money to give to them. Also given it's a PLC they have all kind of interesting options to shaft shareholders so that's also on to us as PIs for falling into the trap of risking it.
As it is a UK PLC you have 2 options left now:
- It happens with a massive dilution
- it happens with 0 value left for several stakeholders
We're at the stage where it is this or they force the deal through. Lenders and Fosun have made a deal and they are really the ones in control now.
Given the parameters of the deal (which are indeed still quite shrouded) it seems that Fosun and the lenders are on the same page. Hence Fosun doesn't care about its existing 18% stake. It'll be good for TCG as an entity (no immediate massive job losses, customers are safe, new investments ...), Fosun (they'll walk out of this owning the Tour Ops entirely and a chunk of the airline) and the lenders (they can do D4E, own a majority stake in the airline and sell tour ops).
The scenario may end up being similar to one I put out before when I said that the entire "Airline can't be owned by Fosun" part can be fixed by just selling Tour Ops instead. With the difference that now it won't be the existing shareholders that will own the airline afterwards but the lenders.
While I had personally envisioned different solutions would materialise I see no way this can end well for shareholders now. Now the cat is out of the bag this deal or another similar deal favouring the lenders is what will happen.
For now it sounds rather complicated without seeing any of the detail. A D4E would wipe out Fosun and give control to the lenders. Fosun would then be quite far away from holding a majority stake and would need to buy the tour operator. Maybe just split it first and then D4E the airline. In that way the shareholder issue for the airline is solved and Fosun still has its stake in TC Tour Ops. The effect for shareholders would then be that you keep your stock in tour ops but hold hardly anything in the airline.
Quisty, as you think Jet2 and Thomas Cook are the same:
- Thomas Cook massively outperformed Jet2 outside the UK! Millions and millions of customers compared to 0 for Jet2. Jet2 must be crap?
- Jet2's hotels? Same story! Thomas Cook's hotels massively outperformed it and got more customers.
Cherry picking numbers is about the easiest thing in the world, especially if the companies aren't exactly comparable due to different strategies, markets ...
Note that this does imply that my personal opinion is that jet2's performance is not something to rate Thomas Cook on cause honestly it doesn't work that way. Thomas Cook needs to perform in ALL of its markets and whether the UK alone goes up or down is of little consequence really.
Hopeso, probably not best to try and see it as a link to Operating Profit. In most cases you'd want to look at the actual mechanism used especially when someone makes a big leap.
For example that big drop in Net Debt in FY13 is essentially in this 1 line from the annual report:
Rights Issue and Placement of 496.6 million Ordinary Shares raising gross proceeds of £431 million
As jj-- correctly pointed out before the net debt as reported is a bit of a weird story anyway. It's not net debt by the strict definition of it as some things are left out. Essentially changing net debt can be done in various ways of which some will be rather questionable (e.g. tell your suppliers somewhere in the year that your payment terms change from 30 days to 60 days and at the end of the year you will have paid only 11 months and hence have more cash and the net debt would decrease in the report (due to what they leave out of the calculation). Looks good, works once.
For net debt to improve you either get more money so you can pay off the debts or you just pay them off. Making a profit is obviously one of the ways to get more money but it's not a reduction of net debt if it is just Operating Profit (which amongst things means that you haven't paid the interest on the debt yet).
Quisty, the funny thing is that rather than look something up you just spout nonsense thinking that you're clever. HG left after FY 2014. So the result for that year? A loss. FY13 then? Loss. Hey maybe she did something spectacular in those few weeks of FY12 she was in TC? Oh, no, loss too. Net debt improved during her tenure, that's it. Essentially you are only demonstrating you have never looked at any of the results.
Quisty, the last time they made a profit was FY 2017. HG was long gone by then. FY 2016? Profit. FY 2015? Profit. Since when is 1 "many"? There was indeed a massive slide in the last year but your (and many others) entire story about how HG was the last and only light in ages is entirely based on nonsense.
Airbus,
Airline with some tourops vs tourops with an airline
Private company vs public company
High risk move into scheduled commercial flights vs sticking to charters
On a company level? No, not really. The general economic circumstances (given Brexit) are somewhat similar yes. But comparing Tour Ops in 2019 with an Airline in the early 90s is fairly pointless. To be honest you can't compare most services to those in the early 90s as a lot has changed in the last 25 years.
"This business has not made a profit in years." -> last time was fiscal year that ended September 2017 which is less than 2 years ago.
As to evolution. Thomas Cook has done a lot more after HG left than during and has solid plans to continue. Yet everyone still thinks that she was magical. (HG is a good example that actually yes, if enough people believe in something SP can raise without too much of a reason to do so).
Within the industry the "so-so" airline has won "World's Leading Charter Airline" 4 times in a row 2015-2018. A massive impact there is Condor and Nordics performance but a lot of people here seem blissfully unaware of the performance of TC outside UK.
So essentially I guess you are one of those who repeat the same story over and over again in the hopes the SP becomes what they want? Cause it's not that it is supported by any facts.