Member Info for NOVECKINGOOD

Huge apologies Paranoia - feel free to go back through all my other posts and point out more of my inadequacies, you obviously play at a different level than me..

I've watched for a while and have traded on the recent B'shit.

Well said KNIGELK the most accurate thing posted on here for months...

Banjo/Columbo - you are completely wrong.

It's a BB, we're having a discussion and trying to learn from one another, just because it doesn't all fit with your own agenda it doesn't mean it shouldn't be believed or posted or needs any sanction ?

I have my reasons for being here and have traded this since December, as I've said to others before choose your battles buddy as you won't catch me out because their is nothing to catch.

It means that it still has support from lenders and that they are trying to get themselves out of the dreadful mess that they’re in..??!!

Debenhams plc
11 March 2019

11 March 2019

Refinancing update

Further to the announcement made on 5 March, Debenhams confirms that it is in advanced negotiations with its current lenders about additional facilities of approximately £150m. £40m of these facilities will refinance the £40m bridge facility announced on 12 February.

A further announcement will be made in due course.


ENDS
Enquiries:
Brunswick Group Craig Breheny/Fiona Micallef-Eynaud
020 7404 5959
debenhams@brunswickgroup.com

always been Askar Alshinbayev and Yevgeniy Feld, two of the company’s original founders.

Their names also frequently appear on boards, or as directors, of the group’s various projects.

So what about Kazakhstan’s top oil official?

In response to reporters’ questions about Mynbayev’s role in Meridian, KazMunayGaz, the state oil and gas company that he heads, responded with a single sentence: “S.M. Mynbayev is not a founder or shareholder of Meridian Capital Limited.” No other shareholders responded.

However, there is one publicly available document which does associate his name with Meridian. A Russian bank then owned by the group filed a 2011 disclosure to comply with newly toughened disclosure requirements.

The document contained a list of people who ultimately controlled the bank at the time: Alshinbayev, Connor, Feld – and Reid Finance, a company incorporated in Bermuda that, according to the document, was acting as a trustee for Mynbayev.

Meridian’s most recent disclosure, filed just a couple of days ago in the United Kingdom, does not include Mynbayev among its shareholders and lists only Alshinbayev, Subkhanberdin, and Feld as beneficiaries.

The company’s ownership is different every time it’s disclosed. The omission of Mynbayev’s name from the latest disclosure could mean that he has recently sold his shares. But because his name was not always revealed in earlier filings, it could simply mean that the company does not give full disclosures of its ownership.

Two more pieces of evidence in the Appleby files suggest that Mynbayev has never given up his initial shares.

In one case, a corporate administrator noted in her timecard for May 21, 2014 that she had spent three hours reviewing email correspondence with Meridian’s lawyer in search of certified documents in relation to a “transfer of shares for S. Mynbayev.” It is unclear whether he was buying or selling shares, or how much, but this does indicate that he was present in the company at the time.

The Appleby leaks also show that, as recently as April 2016, Mynbayev’s name was in a database of active PEPs, a designation that stands for “politically exposed people.” According to a manual for Appleby’s PEP database, only PEPs who are active shareholders will show up, indicating he still owned a stake in Meridian Capital, the only known company associated with his name at Appleby.

Askar Alshinbayev and Yevgeniy Feld, two of the company’s original founders and its most frequently appearing public faces, are on Forbes’ 2014 list of the top 10 richest people in Kazakhstan.

Considering Meridian’s success, this should be no surprise.

But given Mynbayev’s major stake at the time, shouldn’t he also make the list? If he ever chooses to disclose his ownership, perhaps he can look forward to appearing in the next edition.

OCCRP will publish additional details of the organization’s operations in the coming weeks.

In one leaked email, for example, a Meridian employee asks Appleby to prepare the paperwork to transfer shares in Unimilk, a major Russian dairy company, from a parallel structure called Afleet Investments to one of the Cayman funds. “Since Unimilk is now capable of providing required financial information to comply with our strict reporting requirements, it was decided to bring this investment into the Meridian Capital group,” the employees email reads.

An Empire of Oil and Luxury
Meridian’s modus operandi is more about acquiring existing businesses than building them from scratch. Over the years, the company has operated and often sold for profit everything from oil and gas companies to glitzy malls to second-tier airports to vast transportation companies. The company’s shareholders have built a business empire, the full extent of which has been unexplored until today. OCCRP reporters spent months piecing through Meridian’s web of offshores to find the main areas from which it makes its billions.

A key area of business is oil and gas. Over the years, Meridian has made dozens of investments in this sector. In some cases, it acquired already-established companies, often for very little money, and sold them for huge profits. In others, it partnered with Kazakhstan’s state oil and gas giants in joint ventures or got government licenses to set up new projects itself, to which it often invited international investors. Today, it controls over a dozen of oil and mining fields around the world – from Alaska to Africa to Australia.

Meridian also controls a major Kazakhstani rail transportation company which leases wagons and provides maintenance services to some of the country’s largest oil and gas companies, including Tengizchevroil, which operates the country’s largest oil field. It also has dozens of investments in mining and the extractive industries.

The group also made hundreds of millions in real estate, largely in Russia and Kazakhstan. When it sold the St. Petersburg Galeria Mall to Morgan Stanley for $1.1 billion, this was, at the time, the largest Russian real estate deal ever. Last year’s Panama Papers leak shows that it also acquired half of another Kazakhstani real estate empire, Capital Partners, which built and sold projects like Moscow’s Metropolis mall – one of the largest in the country – and Ritz Carlton hotels in Moscow and Almaty.

The Galeria mall in Saint Petersburg.
Credit: St. Petersburg tourist portal
Meridian also acquired at least two business jets and bought a stake in a Russian regional airport company which owns 14 airports – and is gunning for more in Europe.

Finally, it once owned half of Unimilk, a major Russian dairy company which would later be acquired by Danone, the French food giant. Meridian is currently investing in one of Latvia’s largest dairy producers.

Who Owns It Now?
On the rare occasions when Meridian has disclosed anything about its owners, the names that appear have almost alway

to come clean.

“The requested list of information and documents seems excessive,” read one email from a Meridian staffer.

In another case, Meridian agreed to provide Appleby with some information to satisfy Bermuda’s “Know Your Customer” (KYC) rule, which requires a certain level of disclosure about the identity of one’s business partners. But before providing the information, Meridian demanded that Appleby staff first sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Appleby seemed surprised by the request. “I don’t believe we have ever been required to sign a non-disclosure agreement in respect of KYC, nor do I believe it advisable,” wrote an Appleby employee in an internal email. “Has Appleby or one of its service provider entities ever agreed to or signed something like the document in question?”

In at least one case, Meridian preferred to move one of its related companies to another agent rather than going through what an employee called a “time-consuming and expensive KYC again with Appleby.”

The information Appleby had requested in this case was nothing unusual: a report of the company’s activities over the past 12 months, the status of its bank account, and the names of its ultimate beneficial owners. Evidently, this information was not something Meridian wanted its Bermuda law firm to have.

Catch Me If You Can
The profits from Meridian’s global holdings may end up in Bermuda, but that’s not where its operations are run from.

The next level in the pyramid consists of two investment funds – Meridian Capital CIS Fund and Meridian Capital International Fund – which are registered in the Cayman Islands, another secretive offshore jurisdiction.

From there, it gets complicated.

In some cases, the Cayman funds form the top of a chain of holding companies that – for those who have the patience to follow the trail – eventually lead to the actual businesses. For example, Meridian Petroleum, its domestic oil and gas consultancy in Kazakhstan, is owned by a Dutch company that is owned by a Cyprus company which, in turn, is owned by one of the Cayman funds.

In other cases, the name “Meridian” doesn’t show up anywhere in the publicly available chain of ownership of a given business. Instead, its role as “beneficial owner” can only be discovered in obscure reports, sometimes years after it takes control. For example, TengizTransGaz, a major Kazakhstani transportation service provider, has no mention of “Meridian” in any of its four layers of ownership.

In the most complicated cases, Meridian’s businesses are run by nominee owners or by completely parallel structures which lead to separate, seemingly unrelated, offshore holdings. The mechanisms through which the profits from these companies end up in Meridian’s hands are unknown. In such cases, only a leak of private correspondence, like the Appleby leak, allows the connection to Meridian to be established.

In one leaked email, for example, a Meridian employee asks Appleby to prepare

And after Meridian was founded in 2002, his career only continued to rise. By the late 2000s, he had become the country’s key oil official, holding the positions of Minister of Energy and Oil Minister, and then becoming head of KazMunayGaz, the state oil and gas company, where he remains today. In these positions, running a business empire fueled by oil would have been unacceptable and possibly illegal. In response to reporters’ questions about whether Mynbayev has ever disclosed his ownership of Meridian, the company replied that he has never been a shareholder or founder.

But even aside from the legal requirements, Mynbayev – known to be the “president’s man” – had a reputation to uphold.

“Unlike other representatives of the elite, he is … in a shadow, in terms of the absence of any negative reputation,” explains Dosym Satpaev, a Kazakhstani political analyst.

This was a particularly useful asset for a man charged with representing Kazakhstan’s government in major oil deals with foreign corporations.

“Leaders in this sector must be able to work with the international investment community, to find a common language with foreign companies and businesses,” Satpaev says. “Mynbayev is someone who president tries to put into positions where [he needs] to have a presentable, good look.”

Nor would running Meridian openly be a good idea for Mynbayev’s banker partners.

Between 2005 and 2011, Kazakhstani legislation banned owners of offshore companies from holding shares in the country’s banks. This particularly concerns Subkhanberdin and Zhussupova, Meridian shareholders who were both also Kazkommertsbank shareholders.

So Meridians’ co-owners needed secrecy. And Bermuda offered the perfect place to find it. The island doesn’t require companies to disclose their owners. This information is stored only in the records of their registration agents – in this case, Appleby – who have no obligation to reveal them to the public.

But even beyond going offshore, Meridian’s owners took the secrecy to a whole new level. In fact, the Meridian registered in Bermuda is just the top of an enormous pyramid that consists of hundreds of companies across dozens of jurisdictions, including some of the most secretive places in the world.

Secrecy At All Costs
Most legitimate companies use one or just a few law firms to register their offshore companies, even when they have large, elaborate structures. But Meridian had its own in-house service company, based in the UK, which itself used half a dozen offshore service providers or law firms to register small parts of the empire. None of them, including Appleby, had enough pieces of the puzzle to understand the full extent of its holdings.

The leaked emails show evidence of confusion among Appleby administrators about some aspects of Meridian’s structure. And when they asked Meridian for clarification to comply with Bermudan regulations, they were sometimes surprised at their client’s reluctance to c

so it’s not clear what percentage of the company each of Meridian’s ten co-founders initially owned. But a 2006 document gives a full picture of the company’s ownership at that time.

Ownership stakes in Meridian Capital Limited as of 2006.
Credit: Edin Pasovic
The document shows that Mynbayev was the second-largest shareholder, with 18.75 percent. His other co-owners in 2006 – by this point there were six – were Askar Alshinbayev, Yevgeniy Feld, Nurzhan Subkhanberdin, Nina Zhussupova, Azat Abishev, and Ian Connor.

This was a veritable “bankers’ club” – all seven shareholders had occupied top positions in Kazkommertsbank, the fourth-largest in the former Soviet republics.

By then, three years after its creation, the company had already become massively successful and was paying millions in dividends to its shareholders. Ian Connor, Meridian’s only non-Kazakhstani co-owner, had done so well for himself that he was preparing to move to Monaco to lower his tax payments.

This is according to notes (obtained from an earlier leak) from a May 2005 meeting he held with his bank, HSBC, in the French Riviera.

In that meeting, Connor estimated the company’s total assets at $1.2 billion, and said he had received a $9 million dividend payment from the group the previous month.

He described Meridian as a venture capital firm “investing in distressed companies in commodities mining and resources.” Its investments, he said, included major Kazakhstani gold mining and oil companies, though its most recent acquisition had been a mine in South Africa.

For such a big success, one would expect the name “Meridian” to pop up everywhere. You would at least expect the company to have a web site, but it doesn’t.

An online search of Meridian Capital leads to multiple sites that use the same generic name, but none of them are related to the Bermuda company. Considering it is worth billions, the company is nearly absent from the web. It keeps its name out of the press and rarely talks to reporters, even when it is involved in massive projects.

But why would some of Kazakhstan’s wealthiest and best-connected people go to such lengths to hide their success?

For Mynbayev, the most basic reason may have been a straightforward conflict of interest. By the time Meridian was founded, he had already occupied several of the country’s most senior positions, including Finance Minister, Agriculture Minister, and Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration.

Sorry it was a very long post...

his fellow co-founders included top executives and shareholders of Kazkommertsbank, the country’s largest private bank. It was this bank that provided the easy credit that made Meridian an empire that now stretches from the United States to Europe, Africa, Asia, and even Australia.

paradisepapers/occrp/Kazkommertsbank.jpg
The Kazkommertsbank headquarters in Almaty.
Credit: Kazkommertsbank web site
The details of how Meridian’s shareholders exploited the bank under their control are revealed in a separate leak of Kazakhstani banking data obtained by OCCRP.

That leak reveals that the group used a large portion of the bank’s deposits to fund project after project. This enabled them to grow quickly, and at little risk to themselves. According to an email from a central bank official, whenever a project failed, the bank owners and executives – who were also Meridian’s owners – would dump the losses onto the bank’s balance sheets.

This free spending on its own executives’ ventures came back to haunt Kazkommertsbank, which ended up needing multiple government bailouts. Under a state-run stabilization program, infusions of government deposits reached a high of $1.4 billion in 2010. Less than a year after bank was transferred to new ownership, it needed another $7.5 billion bailout. The true cost of the bank’s behavior in bailouts and bad deals will likely never be known, but Kazakhstan’s citizens could be on the hook for billions of dollars.

It is not known how much money Mynbayev and his fellow shareholders have made in total. A 2006 disclosure put Meridian’s value at over $3 billion, but the company is so secretive that the full extent of its investments may also never be known.

This was possible, in part, thanks to Kazakhstan’s notorious corruption and weak rule of law. But it was the Meridian founders’ exploitation of the international financial system that enabled them to hide their riches from the eyes of their own people.

An Island Paradise
It’s a safe bet that few Kazakhstanis have ever been to Bermuda. This tropical paradise is about as far a cry from the land-locked Central Asian country as you can get.

But the strings that connect our modern financial system are long, and can lead to unexpected places. For over a decade, this island nation – known as one of the world’s least transparent tax havens – has been hiding Meridian’s big secret.

Elbow beach in Bermuda.
Credit: Hidefumi Nogami, The Asahi Shimbun, Japan
In November 2002, a clerk at Appleby’s Bermuda office entered ten names into an internal database. A Kazakhstani technocrat and nine bankers joined thousands of other businessmen, oligarchs, politicians, celebrities, and royals who wanted to benefit from the anonymity (and tax benefits) that offshore company ownership provides.

Their company – Meridian Capital – had been incorporated by Appleby staff several months earlier.

The leaked Appleby data is incomplete, so i

Jones is still alive and well and is on ADVFN as hermanngoring.

He still posts lots, some useful some not so. I think he knew there would be a placing as he wouldn't deny it - he just argued about the potential scale of it if you remember.

What was puzzling was why the would take out such a (supposed) large position if he knew there would be a placing ?!

NOVECKINGOOD

I always said there might be a placing. If it came I thought it would be at 15p/20p

I was slightly out.

Whether I bought at 20p or 15p is irrelevant to me.

I will be selling much much higher.
hermanngoring7 Mar '19 - 19:40 - 44492 of 44512
0 0 0
If mjones is to be believed then the Bassa gensets were shipped out of the Country as that is what he posted on here.

Mjones seems to have been privy to quite a bit of inside information as he predicted on a Saturday that Logbaba had come back online and that an RNS would be issued on the Monday and it came true.

He also posted that shareholders would be pleasantly surprised as the Board were going to reduce their salaries substantially and low and behold that was included in the 13p share placing RNS.

Funnily enough when VOG issued the Logbaba RNS they did not mention anything about the gensets being shipped oversees they said:

ENEO has expressed their intention to increase power generation levels to include an additional 20MW from its Bassa Power Station in due course.

It did not say they have expressed an intention once the genets are back in place?

I would imagine the FCA, FSA and Stock Exchange may well be homing in on mjones 727 as the truth always comes out in the end e.g. Paradise papers

FOR MARKETTIMER.

Yes I found out on the Saturday that ENEO were back online and there would be an RNS on the Monday at 7am which there was. Wasn't price sensitive as I couldn't deal.
It was well know by a lot of people that ENEO were back consuming gas before the Monday RNS

Directors salary cuts are not price sensitive information.

Gensets leaving Bassa and going to Columbia is not price sensitive.

Report me markettimer for all I care instead of threatening me on LSE

A discreet investor from Kazakhstan increases his stake in Victoria Oil and Gas
A discreet investor from Kazakhstan increases his stake in Victoria Oil and Gas
comments 0 - Thursday, 07 March 2019 11:14
E-MAIL
FACEBOOK
LINKEDIN
TWITTER
YOUTUBE

(Agence Ecofin) - YF Finance, a London-based investment company (UK), has invested an additional 5.85 million pounds sterling ($ 7.7 million) in the capital of Victoria Oil and Gas, a junior oil listed on the London Stock Exchange and majority shareholder of Gaz du Cameroun.

The investor is 100% owned by Askar Alshinbayev, a 55-year-old businessman from Kazakhstan, and at the typical discretion of all new rich people from the states of the former Soviet republic. YF Finance is already the largest shareholder of VOG with 6.5% equity investments, and will strengthen in the capital of the latter, if the transaction receives the approval of the General Meeting of shareholders.

It should be recalled that this initiative is being deployed as part of a capital increase through the issuance of new shares, which has enabled Victoria Oil and Gas to receive investors' subscription offers for an aggregate amount of £ 13.6 million. ($ 17.7 million).

The mobilized resource will be totally dedicated to strengthening its cash position. VOG had a difficult 2018 year, which was impacted by the non-renewal of the consumer contract of ENEO, a major customer of its portfolio. Also, the company had to restructure its debt to maintain its liquidity.

The capital increase that has just been completed is another good news, as it demonstrates the effective support of its investor base, including the largest. It adds to the fact that a new agreement in principle was signed with Eneo in late 2018, which will allow it to increase its business volume.

But it's clear that more conservative people are at the helm of VOG's Board of Directors. The group should continue with the reduction of its costs. The salary of senior executives is expected to fall by 53%, that of the Chairman of the Board of Directors by 50% and that of the Chief Executive Officer by 33%.

The company has no choice. According to its unaudited accounts, it ended 2018 with a turnover that dropped by more than half to $ 10.6 million. Its cash position of $ 3.6 million is far from $ 11.4 million at the end of 2017. Its net debt was $ 17.3 million. At the same time, it will continue with the development of new acquisitions including Matanda.

Idriss Linen

Copied from ADVFN, I'll post Jones responses to MT shortly

dont forget vog still have an asset in kazakhstan i ..its all making sense now

KEMERKOL
In the 2009 Annual Report and Accounts, the Directors made a provision of $35.5 million against the carrying value of the Kemerkol asset subsequent to our licence being revoked by the Economic Court of the Atyrau Oblast of Kazakhstan. We continue to fight our corner within the constraints of the Kazakhstan legal system and still remain hopeful of a positive outcome but Kemerkol’s long-term economic importance within Victoria’s overall portfolio of assets has been minimised.

Kazakhstan’s Secret Billionaires

by Miranda Patrucic, Vlad Lavrov, and Ilya Lozovsky
5 November 2017
Donate Above: Sauat Mynbaev, chairman of Kazakhstan’s state oil and gas company, KazMunayGaz.
Credit: KazMunayGaz web site
For over a decade, Kazakhstan’s most valuable resources – its oil and gas – have been in the hands of one man. Known for little else other than his managerial skill, the unassuming Sauat Mynbayev has negotiated deals on behalf of his government with oil industry executives from across the world. Officials from oil titans like Chevron and ExxonMobile, Lukoil, the Korea National Oil Corporation, and many others have shaken his hand and signed deals worth billions.

But Mynbayev isn’t what he seems. He’s not just a government technocrat – he’s a magnate himself. And it’s not just oil and gas.

Over a decade ago, in the secretive tropical tax haven of Bermuda, Mynbayev and a group of powerful bankers created a company that would become a multi-billion-dollar empire, investing in everything from real estate to natural resources to banking to aviation, transportation, and dairy.

But Meridian’s inner workings, the full extent of its holdings, and the methods used to acquire them have remained obscured behind a dizzying array of offshore companies that stretch across some of the world’s most secretive jurisdictions.

Until now.

Its secrets are revealed in a leak of 6.8 million confidential records from Appleby, a Bermuda law firm, that were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its global network of media partners, including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

paradisepapers/occrp/Appleby.jpg
Appleby office building in Bermuda.
Credit: Hidefumi Nogami, The Asahi Shimbun, Japan
Not even Appleby – the firm that handled Meridian’s paperwork in Bermuda – was aware of the full extent of their client’s empire. Dozens of leaked emails reveal confusion on the side of the law firm and repeated requests for more information about the group’s structure.

In one email, a Meridian staffer politely declines Appleby’s request for information: “For confidentiality reasons we do not believe it is necessary at present to disclose the whole group,” he wrote. “Your understanding is appreciated.”

It took months of poring through thousands of records for OCCRP reporters to unpeel the multiple layers of offshore companies that make up Meridian – and to come to understand how its stunning success was possible.

In the company’s earlier years, it was Kazakhstan’s booming oil industry that fueled Meridian’s growth. This is no surprise, considering that, for much of his career, Mynbayev was either oil minister or chief executive of the state oil company.

But it wasn’t only Mynbayev who used his power, contacts, and official position to help Meridian grow.

According to Appleby data, his fellow co-foun

Market Cap is more than £20m with 250m shares on the books. 70% dilution was it not ? Still lots of debt and still no payment glee's from the main user, and undoubtedly more fundraising to come.

YF have been buying these since 30p so not the greatest due diligence ever.

It's more positive than it was as it's not going bust, but it's still not that compelling as a risk v reward trade.

Jones is still alive and well and is on ADVFN as hermanngoring.

He still posts lots, some useful some not so. I think he knew there would be a placing as he wouldn't deny it - he just argued about the potential scale of it if you remember.

What was puzzling was why the would take out such a (supposed) large position if he knew there would be a placing ?!

is everyone aware of foo's recent health problems and major operation ?

He's down significantly too.

I've been having the odd spat with him on ADVFN for a few weeks - he's still talking about the long term so is as stitched up and as deluded as ever. He was also even mocking those talking about the supposed placing just this week.

He knew certain things that he probably shouldn't have - but he didn't know enough..

He's down significantly too.

I've been having the odd spat with him on ADVFN for a few weeks - he's still talking about the long term so is as stitched up and as deluded as ever. He was also even mocking those talking about the supposed placing just this week.

He knew certain things that he probably shouldn't have - but he didn't know enough..