Member Info for Senator1

I didn't own the shares a decade ago. I used it as an example that this team has been ineffective for quite some time, from a shareholder perspective. Its not just a recent outcome. On a Strategic reset I thought I would look back over a strategic timeline and see what the results of the last strategy were. What's unusual about that? Has nothing to do when I bought & sold the shares.

You think I'm stupid. Of course I know it cant disrupt at 17%, what sort of clown are you. Wake up. I know exactly how AGM resolutions work and don't need your advise. The 17% I referenced was the actual holding in March 2025, the last time i ran a check, of 2 platforms only and used to illustrate that retail is an important component of the share register. I'm 100% positive that retail is a much higher % of the shareholder base than 17% or even 25% as most sophisticated investors will be able to see the nonsense of this structure.

As to your point on Nominee accounts they are the legal owner of the shares and you, if you are using one of the common retail platforms are a beneficiary and as far as the company secretary is concerned you don't exist. He has no verifiable data that you own shares other than an electronic message from the platform which is not auditable and in fact, the identify of beneficiaries cannot be identified. That is the historical background to the use of Nominee accounts and are still used in this way today. So depending on how you own the shares, getting your vote recognised with the use of platforms using nominee accounts is complicated. I have discussed this extensively with HL and they have launched a complex query investigations into how individual beneficiary votes are recognised by the co. secretary in the absence of their side having a valid audit trail. If I were co. secretary and I got some form of electronic message from HL saying party x voted against the resolution and I had no cross check on the register (which would not be there) I would ignore it.

However, the point remains. Figure out how your platform allows you to vote (in detail) and make sure it counts. If I was chairman of the Board and was getting a significant number of votes against even trivial resolutions I would know there was an issue, loud and clear. As a shareholder, you get to vote, use it and make sure the mechanisms used by the platforms actually count. I have serious doubts that what they are currently doing is effective because of the operational ease they apply by using a nominee structure which has audit trail issues for the co. secretary at the listed co. I for one would not find some form of electronic message that party x owns y shares as acceptable with no cross check from my side. My registrar would show HL nominees but that is all I could verify.

They haven't done it over the last 10 years, in fact the 10 year CAGR total return is -6% odd (that's compounded incl dividends). Words are cheap and that's all these clowns have. I was going to say "Once a loser, always a loser" BUT that is just not true as they siphon off their wealth through the side contracts so they are very far from losing. They win whatever happens and just use shareholder funds to fund their lifestyle and they do it in a very opague way, that's what really annoys me. I'm totally amazed that Artemis, M&G and Gravis have put client money anywhere near this as currently structured.

The last time I looked HL platform owned 10.74% of the shares, II 7.24%. So my strong advise would be you leave a standing instruction with your platform (good until cancelled) to vote against every recommended resolution, no matter how trivial. If 17% voted against every resolution, even the adoption of the accounts, it would make life very difficult for these clowns and they would have to pay attention. The way the platforms work is they are the holder of the shares and so for ex at 31-3-25 HL held 63.4M shares. You need to check that they only need 51% to vote against as I suspect their operating procedure is to vote with the Board unless notified by the beneficiaries to do otherwise (you the real shareholder are the beneficiary). You only have to give the instruction once and if enough do it, life gets very tough for these clowns.

Note 26 gives you the asset manager fee. its buried deep in the accounts and again is hidden by the way the listed entity accounts for its performance. You have to go down and look at the SPv costs which are not visible in the P&L statement presented. Each separate operating entity has its own SPV and the IFRS standard, if you don't understand accounting, helps NESF capital "camoflage" the full extent of what they earn from this garbage. £4.4M in asset management fees for 6 months for looking after operations at the SPVs. NESF capital don't really care about Grier and his investment management fees. The really cherry are these fees, buried in note 26, two from the end. If you don't know what you are looking for, you have next to no chance of finding these fees. They additionally charged £94k for ESF advice for 6 months, expect the same again in the second half. They really are taking shareholders for mugs. No mention of all this in the strategic reset. This entity is just total garbage and the laughable thing is these contracts unless they can be broken are a poison pill that will make sure no one touches it. No institution in their right mind would pay these clowns this sort of renumeration. This is reserved for dumb retail.

Read the interim accounts to Sept 25. There you will find the investment management fee in the cflo statement. Read the notes and at sub level you will see what they paid the asset manager. Multiply by 2, divide by market cap. You don't need to be clever but you do know how to read!

Sorry £2.6m rather than £2.8M

I have been concerned for quite some time about what appears uneconomic share trades in Global Data. 1-3-5 less than 100 shares on quite a regular basis that would not make economic sense and then I discovered Note 12 which tells me that the EBT is selling shares to generate the cash to pay cash bonuses to employees. They record the cost in the 2025 accounts as £2.8M. Im not sure if this means £2.8M value of shares will be sold or whether this is an incremental cost or precisely what it means. My suspicion is if it was only £2.8M why have the EBT sell shares to generate the cash and particularly when the share price is so low. Why not pay it out of the available debt facilities. If the full cost was only £2.8m it is neither here nor there and that is why I think it is just not about the £2.8M. I'm sure the EBT will have arranged a total execution cost for selling the shares and this is some pro-rata amount and my guess is it is JP Morgan is the other side as they have no execution costs and so its costs them nothing to do these piddley trades, they get paid a percent of the program size, is my guess. The real question is why is it necessary for the EBT to sell the shares to meet the cash costs at these low levels. This is the only rational explanation behind the very odd bargain sizes as for 99% of participants they are uneconomic. The second and far more important question is why DATA has elected to generate the cash by the EBT selling shares particularly as they would have bought shares in 2025 at far higher levels. This is odd and needs an explanation. DATA ignore questions to IR but maybe if they got continual requests (say a 1,000 emails a day from 100 people) for answers they might respond to the owners. If nothing else the issue is now out in the open and is very odd.

The current fees paid to the investment and asset manager is 4.91% of the current market cap. In 10 years, nothing else changing that is nearly 50% of current market cap extracted in fees. Who are the dumb schmucks, NESF Capital/affiliates or shareholders? This is daylight robbery, overseen by an incompetent Board. No institution with any sense will go anywhere near this until they know they can immediately dump both managers with no compensation. How any Board could sign of on such eggregious contracts with no performance metrics is beyond me. Last time I looked the Board held 190k shares and NESF employees 2.1M out of a net 575.2m shares. Their future is not tied to the share price so they couldn't care less about its decline, its peanuts in the scheme of things. Take a bow Board of Directors, nice work. This is rip of retail shareholders in the UK at its finest work. The message is clear, never ever buy a share with an incomprehensible dividend yield and never ever buy any share without seeing that managers are fully aligned and feel the pain when the share price falls. NESF is a case study on everything that is bad about having the people running shareholder capital being renumerated by side management contracts rather than from the wealth they create within the listed vehicle. In future, avoid these structures like the plague no matter how enticing they might seem! This whole structure is garbage.

The problem with all of this is the investment manager essentially picks the Board. They don't want strong independently minded people that will crumble their gravy train and of course those on the Board want their fees which they would lose with a different investment manager. The whole thing is rotten to its core. The LSE allows this boys club as they just care about their listing fees and fees they get on every trade. Their is nobody in the UK market that stands up for retail investors that has real bite and strikes fear in the Board that they will be relentlessly exposed. Just look at the questions that were read out from the online questions, a village idiot could have answered those questions. Be careful with putting money in to this garbage, losers for 10 years are highly likely to be future losers. Over the next 10 years though they will collect £40M management fees and £80M asset management fees if the current structure stays in place. That is extraordinary renumeration given their track record. At the very minimum (and its a bare minimum) they should be paid in shares and never ever cash and it should have been this way over the last 10 years. The way this operates makes me very angry & the new Chairman with his statements are a disgrace. How could he talk about excellent management, does he think retail investors are dumb and cant do some very basic maths. After he said that I would have thrown the prsentation in the bin if they were presenting to me and asked them to leave.

How can the Chairman refer to those associated with NESF as high performing. That is factually not true. Over 10 years they have lost 50% of value including dividends. You should not be allowed to make these clearly wrong and misleading statements. A little bit of maths due diligence tells you this is wrong.

I just worked out the 10 year TOTAL RETURN CAGR based off Adj. Close price. In the 10 years it has lost 50.3% or an annual CAGR of -6.74%. So the level of fees I have shown in this post, IS UNDOUBTEDLY PAYMENT for FAILURE, 100%. 10 years and including DVDs you have lost 50% of your investment. Ridiculous. Should have 100% have lost the mandate if the Board was strong and they 100% should have been focused on a merger. The only ones making money on this garbage are the hired managers, not shareholders.

In the 6 months to Sept 25 (latest accounts available) the incompetent feather my own nest parties associated with the investment manager have taken from shareholders, the following (and remember this was only in 6 months!!!);

Investment Mgmt Fee: £2M

Asset Mgmt Fee: £4.4M

Dir Fees: £0.2M

Legal: £0.62M

Adm Fees: £0.4M

or a grand total of £7.6M. £7.6M for 6 months, these people are taking the p..s. That's the reason no strategic merger was considered as their gravy train would be at risk, everything else is nonsense. The only people getting rich on this rubbish is those associated with the NESF capital group as the investment manager and asset manager fees show. They just get stooges to be on the Board and sign off on this rubbish. There are many things wrong with a UK listing and allowing this rubbish on the market is near top of the list. I note their big strategic review didn't even mention this egregious level of payment for failure. Anyone associated with this garbage should be ashamed.

JP Morgan asset management have the largest short position while the Inv Bank is their corporate broker. Sort of makes a nonsense of them as corp broker. Only the HO clowns at DATA wouldn't notice!

Sky was last a public co. in Nov 2018 after its acq by Comcast and fact it was taken out by Comcast suggests to me its share price performance was not great. Lets see but not really the profile I wanted. More of the same it looks to me. I have asked some very straightforward questions off the current IR and they just ignore them. That tells me everything I need to know and the fact there is only 1 significant institutional holder. The fact they were allowed on the big Board tells you the crisis the LSE is in.

I just hate it when a co. inflicts damage on itself by being totally incapable of communicating a really simple story. Back at the end of 2024 DATA sold 40% of Healthcare at an EV of £1.1bn based on a reported LTM adj. ebitda of £50M or 22x. You might think Inflexion were stupid but I don't think so. Adj. ebitda in FY 25 was £61.8M, a 24% improvement and Healthcare sales in FY 25 were up 12.7% and it has an adj. ebitda margin of 50.1%. That's a fantastic underlying margin and with the growth they have shown, well worth 22x, imo. In fact the reported 22x multiple is 17.8x on their 2025 adj. ebitda outcome, so Inflexion were definitely not done, that was a fair deal and I don't think they will be in the slightest way upset. They will do very well on this investment. As the Non Healthcare margin is essentially half that of Healthcare I use an 8x multiple for valuation and when you run all this through and take off the overhead cost times 10, I get a backward looking FV of £1.58 a share. As its backward looking it does not incorporate the improvements to the margins which are coming in future years as they get the recent acquisitions integrated and get the non Healthcare side much more efficient. If I factor this in, which is not yet visible I easily get north of £2. The fact that the central management team cannot tell this story is shameful. If I was a smart data engineer in DATA I would be pointing the figure at central management incompetence and demanding they do their part. They have proprietary data sets, great margins, yes mostly inorganic growth but so what, its growth and a fabulous return on capital. How can they not sell this story, this is as easy as it gets but yet the HQ clowns make a mess of it. The market is the smartest analyst I know and there is always a reason. They will make excuses and say "yeah, but anything software is out of favour". BS, that is when fabulous IR and communication makes a difference. Wake up central management, do your job or get to hell out of the way! When I was a student one of the books that made the biggest impression on me was R. Moss Kanter's "The Change Masters". In this she essentially advocated throwing the baby out with the bath water as when you want to make a change it is hard and wastes a lot of time identifying the good from the bad. I would like to see this applied to all players in the team selling the DATA story. Of course that will be impossible as the one who must take the vast majority of the blame is Danson himself. He has assembled a brilliant business and is a brilliant strategist but that doesn't make him a good communicator. This business is in DESPERATE need of a great IR director. They will need to be incredibly strong to make it work and should not report to the CFO but be at an equal level. Will that happen, probably not!

I sent a strongly worded communication to the CFO reminding him that even though they have a 60% shareholder they need to communicate with the rest of the shareholders. Their shareholder register is evidence of what happens when you don't. The IHT lot sell out and there are no buyers when the co. is not buying itself.. His response was

"We are using the move to the Main Market as a catalyst to improve investor engagement".

What a ridiculous response. You should be engaging with the people who own the co. no matter what market you are listed on. This CFO is way out of his depth and has limited understanding of what it takes to be the CFO of a listed co., AIM or otherwise. He also said he was going round the city making presentations to investors. That clearly went well. Based on his response to me and the share price reaction he made a similar impression on those he met to the impression he left me with, from an email. I certainly understand why there is no investor interest and given I have never heard of the co. the new CFO comes from I fear it will be something similar, a bookkeeper, nothing more. I get the very strong impression that Danson doesn't want to be surrounded by world class individuals and clearly the city institutions apart from one, don't really trust him. The presentation they eventually posted on their website is very low quality.

Most institutional investors wont put up with this rubbish and you can see it in the register where the only one of any note is Liontrust and I bet they rue the day they got involved. They are now of course stuck as there are no institutional shareholders capable of doing the size they need and if they feed their holding out bit by bit they get killed as it will take weeks for them to get anything done. This co. is a "classic" example of the peril of buying in to any company with a large controlling shareholder. Im sure they have p---sed off the AIM market and I am sure will do the same on the main board and all self inflicted.

They put out the results this morning and no notice of a call or anything like every other listed company. If there was a vote for the worst investor IR on the listed market this company would be top of my list. They are totally wasting their time and money going for main market listing. This sort of approach shouldnt be allowed and you should be required to have a sophisticated IR process before being approved. They just blatantly ignore other shareholders and dont even do the basics. I can see now why the two private equity firms walked away as I am 100% sure this attitude comes from the top and I am also sure they were a nightmare in terms of communication and they both got fed up.

As it is likely to be demoted on March 4th from 100 to 250, not the best time to buy!