Member Info for PuzzledPete

What you are missing is that original shareholders now have only 14% of the share of the company they had before the warrant scheme. And the shares are now well above their asset value.

Stay Calm. Edison's small print "This report (on Met1's Black Schist) has been commissioned by Metals One and prepared and issued by Edison, in consideration of a fee payable by Metals One. Edison Investment Research standard fees are £60,000 pa for the production and broad dissemination of a detailed note" Not surprising they'll produce a report is it. But Edison never make recommendations, only a valuation IF the becessary capital spending has been made. Any 'valuation' of a pre-production project such as black schist is therfore pie-in-the sky. Not only that, but EDs report was pre-the catastophic dilution brought about by the warrants wheeze, and continuing with Met1' wild spending on other speculations.

Mr Simon What on earth do you mean "Progressing" ? What's your definition of progress? Is it justa adding more and more speculative investments ? Do you want them to turn into mines ? Do you know what the will entail ? Do you mean selling the investments at a profit ? Do think.

I note you piled into Met1 only a month ago. And have drivelled incessantly about it while obviously knowing nothing about it.

Well at least someone on here is inquisitive. If you've followed mining, you'd know that valuations for eartly stage exploration are highly erratic and totally unptrredictable. It depends who might want it, where it is, etc etc. Met1 has onbviously paid, only recently, and probably for a premium, the most up-to-date market value for its projects. And just to keep adding more and more to the basket doesn't add reliability. It just adds to the majority in the basket who will need more and more spending. You have to ask yourself why if its business model is so attractive, no one else and no broker came up with funding or interest to allow management to have avoided being shafted by the onerous deal offerd it by what can only be termed shysters.

Before the warrants deal (pre-consolidation) Met1's shares were around 40-50p , and the net assets per then 35m or so shares were about £9m- ie around 25p per then share. (all figures a bit rough because basic numbers were a moving target)

Now, there are 500m shares post consolidation (5,000 pre-consolidation) and post the pre-paids who've now all been executed net assets (at around £11m) are not much higher. So net assets per share are now only 2.2p. Yet shareholders only have 1/10th the shares they had before consolidation. So anyone can see that they've effectively been shafted by over 110 times ?

Yet the share price (even after their crash) is now back to pre-deal and pre-consolidation levels.

Why ? There's no reason to think the company now deserves an 110 times better rating than it did before. Its a puzzle. Don't investors realise what has happened ? (eg a holder of 100 pre-deal shares worth £25, now has 10 shares worth 22p)

He's been shafted of 91% of his share of the company, at the same time as the 5 pre-paid warrant holders have pocketed a fortune. The warrants were all executed and presumably immediately sold mainly through May to July.Look at the share chart. The 5 warrant holders paid 2p. Assuming their average sale was 20p, they have walked off with £45m profit, while company shareholders received a paltry £3.4m.

Tell me that isn't a major scam. And tell me why investors still trust a management that did that to them. And tell me why the company is paying £2m to a Canadian PR firm (Fairfax Partners) to puff the shares ? That's more than 20 times a UK firm would have charged.

Can anyone solve the puzzle ? Or are my numbers wrong ?

I advised avoiding this more than 10 years ago. It has too many pies in which it is sticking one finger at a time. Before even one comes right, it will be only after massive capital need and meanwhile the others will continue to be a drag. The top managemenent hasn't a clue how to manage the finances needed for its wide ambitions. But only to keep its and its advisers' gravy trains going. The way to run multiple projectsw isn't to load load them into one basket but to manage and finance each one separately and on its own merits.

Continued

So in Dec 2021 ACF arrived at a UAE share price 'target' of '115p-127p'. Along with earlier similar 'targets' that had persuaded investors to chase the shares up from 4p in 2019 to over 30p and sometimes 40p in 2021, that 'scenario' inevitably proved to be bogus, and saw the shares crash to under 10p only a few months later and to continue on down, never to recover. They’re now about 5p

ACF has now published a similarly paid-for forecast 'scenario' for Mast's ramp up of its plants - to 150MW by end 2026 (already shown to be unrealistic); has omitted to allow for the fact they will have to be financed by Powertree or Riverfort or somebody; has exaggerated the revenues and profit (by 45%) the existing Pyebridge is achieving and more than Mast's own consultants produced in 2023; and very oddly, not only fails to explain where the £105m of capital expenditure it says is needed to get to 160MW will come from, but has omitted that amount from its own value ‘forecast’.

On top it has committed the same schoolboy howler as for EUA, using a method investors never do, by totting up its resulting (in practice fantasy) future profits for the next 13 years (by which time the plants will be more than half-way through their lives and the UK will have phased out gas) and saying that is the share value 'now'. (ie as if anyone would pay ‘up front’ for even a reliable income far into the future. If you do the same for any other share in any other market sector you would get a share price 3-4 times what is actually achieved even for a reliable long life company on a high PER.)

Not only that, but ACF tots them up only after 2028, before which Mast will have built up £70m of losses (more like over £100m in reality) which it doesn't explain how will be financed.

And even that is not nearly all. ACF 'assumes' that only a fraction of the warrants will be exercised so that, instead of the resulting 1,380m shares (just the pre-paids) eventually in issue, it assumes only 217m (against 13.2m now)

Add up all those exaggerated figures, and ACF gets a 'share price target' of 858-902p (Phew ! what accuracy !)

And Why, crucially, does ACF assume the warrants won't be exercised ?

It has 'research' that shows that only 22% of warrants ever get executed, failing to note that the overwhelming majority of warrants in its ‘research’ hardly ever saw much of a 'in the money' margin and many are 'out of the money' - ie there was little incentive to bother.

But at present Mast's warrants (12 times as many as the existing shares) are showing an enormous 'in the money' available profit of (say 60p/4p) ie a 15 times for warrants already paid for. So there is no bother at all.

All that is needed is for PK to persuade them (those Canadian Moms and Pops ?) - and anyone else not to bother.

Puzzle Solved. Believe ACF (and PK) at your peril.

Continued

So they immediately pushed up the shares which are now around 70p to a £9m market cap, when Mast’s assets even after the £2.6m are only about £5m and will be less after the losses any analyst can foresee over at least the next two years, and where including £4m for the fixed plants Mast is technically cash-insolvent. (admitted in the latest warrants) so will need even more cash before long

But although the warrants are now "IN" an enormous amount of money (holders can make a 18,000% instant profit by exercising and selling at 70p) they have not yet been.

At the moment there are only 13.25m shares (after the 1:40 consolidation) actually in issue against the 1,380m that will be if just the pre-paid warrants are exercised. In other words, assets per share, instead of the apparently 37p per share now and falling will actually be only 0.37p - which should be the price the shares will settle and which accounting rules for including all live warrants will eventually show.

So why haven't those warrants (already paid for at 4p) been exercised ? Maybe holders haven’t got the certificates yet, and with most of them apparently located abroad (solicited by the Canadian PR firm that arranged the warrants) perhaps they aren't au fait with the London market or with the UK energy market, or with the current situation with Mast, or might be the 'mom and pop' investors who traditionally in Canada invest blindly in junior mining or energy companies and lose over 80% of their money.

In any case Mast's directors - ie Pieter Krugel - must be getting the willies in case they do, because his shares will plummet along with all the others.

So he’s going to repeat what he did before – Innit ? Commission presentations and 'research' promising a vastly profitable future and much higher share price.

First he tried the Sunday Roast paid for PR firm who allowed PK, without challenging, to make presentations that led investors to believe the 'revenues' coming from Pyebridge and others would come to Mast, when in fact they will go to the SPV's. (Not making clear, either, that profits will be only around 1/3rd of ‘revenues’ before even the large proportion going to Riverfort or Powertree who have put up most of their cost.)

But Roast seems to have been discarded (perhaps someone told them they were aiding and abetting misrepresentation) because, instead, along has come 'ACF Research' - notorious for taking payment to produce outrageously exaggerated 'valuations' for their client's company.

Eurasia Mining was a recent one. ACF firstly produced a wildly optimistic and never likely to be achieved 'scenario', and then used a completely inappropriate 'method' to value it consisting of totting up all the profits that it said (with no justification) would be made over the coming 13 years, and said 'that' is EUA's value 'now'.

Puzzled by Mast's exaggerated share price and its conflicting info, I've dug deeper.

PK seems to be trying to be a wizard share manipulator. He's got a track record, even before Mast's April 2021 float. Then, by prior manipulation of the shares making up its issued capital, he bamboozled just those investors, clients of a spread bet broker inexperienced in equity shares, to put up all the £5.5m Mast raised (at 12.5p) before its market float, pretending that because it placed only 25% of its shares, Mast was 'worth' £22m - when in fact its assets were only £4.4m after the cash raise.

With nothing raised in the market, there was no call for a proper prospectus - so PK got away with omitting the vital information a public cash raise would have called for. Her didn’t need to because he had made a 'presentation' (not repeated in the prospectus - to those first inexperienced investors, who put up all he wanted) which compared Mast to other companies in the 'clean energy' sector which had recently surged, but where a close look showed they were in no way comparable to Mast.

Inevitably the truth emerged over the following year, principally that outside funding would be needed to fund Mast's 'projects' costing a large part of whatever they earned (not clearly spelled out in the prospectus even though essential for Mast to continue) and that its projects are not owned directly but via legally separate ‘Special Purpose Vehicles’ funded by others. So the first investors lost 90% of their investment, while Mast's £4.4m assets at the float turned into only £2.6m even after about £0.5m of share raises meanwhile.

In that time broker WH Ireland (the only reputable one to do so and experienced in the power market) started coverage, only to drop MAST after taking a closer look.

Incompetent management (and the liabilities and true structure of the company conveniently omitted from the prospectus) failing to deliver a single one of the boasts made at the float, left Mast's finances so dire after four years that it had to resort to that alternative to even 'death spiral financing' - issuing a whopping 5,000 m pre-paid 0.1p warrants against the then only 452.6m shares and a recent share price around 1p. (figures before the 1:40 consolidation)

So not just those naive initial shareholders, but even Mast's own management, stand to lose yet another 90% of the 90% they had already lost from their original investment once the warrants are exercised.

But meanwhile newcomers apparently ignorant of Mast's history, misinterpreted the announcement of the warrants £5m cash raise (actually only £2.6m after onerous fees) as adding to £5m Mast's value, without realising it was at the expense of the disastrous nearly 120 times increase in shares once the warrants are exercised.

continued

Amateur

I should have added of course that the approx £4m of nettrade liabilities Mast now has (we'll see the figures end Sept) is in addition to Pyebridge's outstanding £1.9m loan. Pyebridge and the others are SPV's whose assets and borrowings don't appear on Mast's balance sheet and is another llittle thing PK doesn't ever mention. (IT wass SPV's that broght Enron down and lost shareholders everything)

Amateur

So what cash would that be ?

The last balance sheet showed negative net assets of £1.24m, and total assets of £4.1m. That means MAST had a net £5.34 of liabilities. But the placing only raised £2.6m after fees, and that was mostly slated to part build Bordersley.

After costs (mostly gas) Pyebridge’s 1st half profit from its £745k revenue would have been about £250k, not enough to cover Mast’s £400k or so overheads. So how come it paid off £870k of Riverfort’s £2.8m loan ? From increasing those liabilities of course. And although PK tells us Mast now has no borrowings, it will still have nearly £4m of net trade liabilities which means no one else will do business with it.

So where is that cash it needs to fund the other projects ?

Nothing for this company ever adds up. Including the debts PK doesn’t mention and that even after the disastrous (for shareholders) pre-paid warrants scheme, it still needs at least the next warrants tranche (and another 250m dilution) to merely get to a neutral balance sheet.

And yet investors are valuing Mast at over £8m. That doesn’t add up either.