The Times - 28/11/20 - FULL Transcript28 Nov 2020 16:03
Remote Monitored Systems boss Paul Ryan sold shares before warning of production delay led to 25% fall
Louisa Clarence-Smith Tom Howard
Saturday, November 28 2020 12:01am The Times
The chairman of an Aim-listed company and one of its biggest investors sold all their shares for about £16 million a week before a production delay was revealed, wiping out a quarter of its market value.
Remote Monitored Systems warned on Thursday that the antiviral face masks being developed by one of its subsidiaries would not be ready until the new year. Its shares slumped by 25.5 per cent, or ½p, to 2p. Yesterday they were flat at 1¾p.
In the week before the announcement, Paul Ryan, 53, the chairman, sold all 70.7 million of his shares, which were worth £2.1 million.
Braveheart Investment Group, one of RMS’s biggest shareholders, sold its shares last week when they were valued at £14.3 million. Braveheart is run by Trevor Brown, 74, who is executive director of RMS.
RMS was founded in 2013 as Strat Aero, which provided management systems and consultancy services to the aviation market. It was listed on Aim in 2014 and changed its name to RMS in 2018 after shifting its focus towards providing monitoring system. In August, the company said that it had agreed to buy Pharm 2 Farm, a Nottingham Trent University spin-off that is developing an antiviral mask with copper nanoparticles to kill Covid-19.
RMS bought Pharm 2 Farm by issuing 600 million new shares, valued at about 0.4p each, or £2.4 million. It awarded about half to Gareth Cave, 46, the scientist who founded Pharm 2 Farm, with the remainder going to Braveheart.
The share price jumped on November 13 when Mr Cave told investors to watch out for a stock exchange update on the masks. He tweeted: “The UK demand is about 2 million a day, so we’re ‘gonna need a bigger boat’. Lots of things in the pipeline so keep an eye out on the RNS next week.” The shares closed up 2p, or 66.7 per cent, to 5p, in a day.
Braveheart said this week that it had sold all its shares in RMS between November 16 and 18 after it became apparent that there was a “significant demand” in the market “at a valuation significantly above the expectations of the directors” at the time of its sale of Pharm 2 Farm.
It said that it would allocate the money from the share sale to invest in Paraytec, which is developing a Covid-19 test. RMS, Braveheart, Mr Ryan and Mr Brown did not respond to requests for comment.
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