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This comment makes even recent posts look like incisive, grown up analysis.
Even if such talks were happening (and I dont believe they are) anybody who was actually in the know wouldn’t be daft enough to post about it on here.
Mr Majid, in light of this morning’s RNS and your own denials here that you have any knowledge of what Twitter rumours might be referring to, are you able either:
- to give a concrete update on your group’s actions and your view of any likely results, OR
- to confirm that the contributions people have made to support your endeavours will now be returned.
Viking, your logic is all over the place. Even if there were equal number of rejected and upheld complaints (so 50/50) the cost of the rejects is not the same as the upholds because there’s no redress to pay. So the non-upholds are not “costing” genuine claimants 17p in the £.
The 59% is low - for a long time, Amigo’s FOS uphold rate was well into the 80%. And that’s 80% of complaints sent to FOS - Amigo will also have upheld complaints so that the customer didn’t need to send to FOS. By any measure, a large majority of complaints were found by Amigo or FOS to be justified. That is why James Benamor told shareholders - over three years ago! - that the total redress bill would be in excess of £1 billion. So none of this should be a surprise and it simply doesn’t pass muster to blame this on bandwagon jumpers. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t accept that just because GJ said it, it must be true.
100% agree that a firm cannot get things as badly wrong as Amigo has and not expect CMCs to be interested. The best protection against CMCs is to do things properly.
There you go again. False claimants are a red herring. GENUINE claimants are only getting 17p in the £. Unarguably, Amigo can only afford to repay a fraction of what it has itself judged to be legitimate claims.
What part of that do you refuse to see?
ShareFishShare - you’re a few years out of date. Amigo has accepted that it owes these liabilities for several years now.
Shareholders themselves had the option of challenging these liabilities when James Benamor tried to take back control of the company and judicially review the FCA. Shareholders voted to reject his plan and back the Board. So several management teams and boards and their advisers, and even shareholders themselves have accepted that customers are genuinely owed compensation.
It sounds as if your friend may have been one of the customers who really could afford his loan and who has no complaint against Amigo. But tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) were badly treated and deserve their payout.
I suspect too many shareholders have bought or kept stock in Amigo because they can’t / won’t accept that reality.
There really is no point remaining in denial about this - if Amigo is to carry on (a remote possibility) it needs to learn and accept where it went wrong.
It would be a tragedy if those who had already lost a significant amount of money on their investment were now induced to throw good money after bad in a futile attempt to salvage something from the wreckage.
Not only is a credible investment strategy required but - first and foremost - a credible legal strategy is required. I have seen no evidence of either.
ASAG do not have to be fraudsters in order for people to lose out again. They could simply be badly misguided about what is achievable. Based on what the judge said about Mr Majid’s statements at the sanction hearing, that seems to be a very real risk.
I would urge everyone to tread extremely carefully. Best wishes to all.
Is there an update from the meeting that was scheduled for last Friday between Amigo and shareholder groups?
Against the absence of any update from Mo Majid and colleagues, Amigo continues to make market announcements that show the board pressing on with the wind down. With every day that passes, Amigo becomes less investable - staff leaving, systems and IP being sold, and share schemes wound down with zero value.
If ASAG thinks there is a realistic path out of wind down, now would be a good time for a meaningful update.
Cardinal - this isn’t a winding up order.
This is a court sanctioned scheme of arrangement, the terms of which were set by Amigo. Paragraph 17 of the judgment says that:
“If the New Business Conditions are not satisfied, or if ALL certifies to the Scheme Supervisors that they do not expect them to be satisfied, the Fallback Solution will be implemented”.
That has now happened. I can see no provision in the judgement or the Scheme documents for that step to be reversed. I am happy to be corrected if you can point to the relevant part of the official documents.
Profitjock, even if the board’s decision to wind down is shocking and wrong, your post doesn’t answer how or even whether it can be reversed.
I am not sure that there is a legal mechanism to reverse the decision. Even if there was (and even if it was successful), can it be executed in time?
And even if it could be executed in time, would Amigo look any more attractive to investors after yet another boardroom battle? Would it look any more attractive after yet another trip to court? What would the costs of these wranglings do to Amigo’s financial prospects? How does Amigo re-recruit staff to replace those it only made redundant a week ago? What exposure would a revived Amigo have to shareholders who sold up because they were told in an official market announcement that the company was now being wound down?
None of the fundamental issues listed as the reasons why investors wouldn’t commit go away after the board’s decision is challenged. And after the merry go round of Benamor, Hamish, Glen, Gary, and Danny, Amigo’s brand looks even more ridiculous even in the very unlikely event that your desired outcome happens.
I am not sure which RNS some people have read or which shareholder meeting they listened to.
The RNS of 23rd March says the whole group will be wound down and no shareholder value will be retained in he ordinary shares of Amigo Holdings PLC. It says the objective of the wind down is to maximise the return for creditors (and to take care of employees).
Some of these posts sound as though they come from a parallel universe.
I think first key question for shareholders is whether what the board is doing is legally defensible, given their responsibilities as directors. For me, the answer to that question is yes. In fact I think the board would say they were required to take the decision based on what they knew and have been advised. That’s a different question to whether it was the right commercial decision or in shareholders interests.
The next question before anyone loses more money on a lost cause is whether the move to fallback and wind down is, in reality, reversible. As I understand it, the directors were required to place the company into fallback scheme as soon as they judged the preferred scheme as not proceedable. I am not aware that there is any mechanism for moving from fallback to preferred scheme. Shareholders have made decisions based on the announcements already made, staff have been made redundant, and the directors will expose the firm to challenge if they reverse course. So I would want to know whether it’s even possible to revive the preferred scheme before I chipped in. Shareholders who are aggrieved with the decision might better pursue other action.
I do think the board is in a weak position regarding previous announcements about the scale of lending in recent months. The numbers given last week on loan book size did not appear to match the £1m a month previously disclosed in market announcements.
I regard George1252’s opening post as cruel.
If what he says is true, the board need to be prosecuted for publishing knowingly misleading RNS announcements, including the one that was issued less than an hour ago.
“The SoA2 judgement calls out that these schemes are designed to be a method in ensuring some value is provided to creditors, whereas administration would provide little to none.”
Beastly, this is just factually wrong. The £97m already ringfenced for creditors will still be available in wind down. That’s why there’s no incentive for creditors to vote for an SOA3 that removes the extra £15m and possibly introduces delays and uncertainty. Almost 90% of the amount they’ll get under scheme 2 is already in place. In another creditor vote (required for SOA3), I suspect many creditors would relish the chance to put Amigo out of business if it didn’t affect their payout.
I am more convinced that there won’t be room to cut the £45m target. Other than the £15m for scheme, the last RNS said they were exploring shaving £3m off that £30m, so I think it’s pretty much non negotiable.
Coiled spring, I agree with you. It would be nice if the BoD explained its thinking on this. If this has escaped them as a possibility, they shouldn’t be drawing their salaries.
I do wonder whether there isn’t any room to come down from £45m. After momajid reminded us of the court judgement when the scheme was sanctioned, the judge was adamant that the raise for scheme funds and the raise for future business were inseparable. I think his view was that it’s wrong to ask shareholders to stump up £15m for the scheme if the underlying business is not viable. So I wonder whether £45m is the baseline requirement to keep the firm going (and make the scheme contribution).
Other than removing the £15m scheme contribution (which I think is a non starter), latest RNS mentioned trying to get £3m removed for future operations. So I suspect that’s the limit of what they can trim without seriously compromising the future business.
Interested in other thoughts - would be nice to have a firm position from the BoD.
Magpies, the point I’m making is that his views and his proposed course of action were tested and rejected by shareholders. If that was the wrong call, then you can’t expect to be protected from getting it wrong.
Gary’s SOA2 - which I criticised at the time as too punitive for shareholders - has met with no opposition by you, Mr Majid, or any any shareholder - until it has run into last minute difficulty.
Too many shareholders seem to want a one way bet to guaranteed profits, including being able to rip up court sanctioned agreements two months before deadline when it looks like it might not go the way they want. Shareholders have already had multiple attempts at a scheme as well as the waiver of a £73m fine and yet many of you still feel hard done by!
James Benamor did indeed want to challenge FCA and FOS on affordability. The rest of the board didn’t. He called an EGM and asked shareholders which plan they preferred. He wasn’t shouted down, he was VOTED down.
I happen to think that was the right decision. I also think Benamor forfeited any right to be taken seriously when he poured petrol on this situation with his stupid blogs in March 2020.
In much the same way as shareholders voted against Benamor’s plan to judicially review FCA, they also voted unanimously FOR Gary and Jonathan to continue in role last September, after the scheme and dilution was public knowledge. That’s 475 million votes and not a single one of you opposed Gary and Jonathan’s course of action.
As you say, Magpies, start taking responsibility for what shareholders have decided.