7 JUNE HEARING - FULLER REPORT (PART 1) - APOLOGY FOR DELAY19 Jun 2023 09:40
After Johns’ forum suggestion to contest the Scheme, a group of 9 resulted, namely:- Cat5: Johns: oldman45: picsmaister: RodneyT: ronwoking: senseman & 2 others who wish anonymity. All contributed, so forum thanks should go to the collective all. It just fell that 3 of us were able, and best equipped, to attend on 7 June.
We tried our utmost. The Judge in giving Judgement directly praised our Document quality, the collective effort, & the +30 private investor emails/documents he received. Our skill-lacking area was court-presentation a barrister or solicitor would have provided. HUR had Kings Counsel, Dentons solicitors, Stifel, Maris, Chaffe and others. Prax had Counsel & solicitors
HUR & Prax lodged large document bundles/witness statements (similar to 2021). It’s KC stated HUR knew from 2021 & current monitoring of LSE forum that SHs were activist, disagreed the Scheme, and may act. They were clearly genuinely worried. The Judge had sight of these but we did not - having emailed our Doc to the Court only on 6 June, we had not 'served' it on HUR, and thus left no time to be served HUR’s document bundles. The downside for us being the bundles included all the $3.4mill promotional guff including HUR’s fairytale P6 standalone 2026 8p end-figure (ie. magically marginally less than Prax’s minimum end 2026 figure) and high risk 1 well 1 pump exagerations. Astonishingly, even HUR KC's skeleton argument (we were provided copy at kick-off) was 25 PAGES LONG, and lodged at Court 2 days prior with an estimated 2 hrs judge’s reading time.
The 90 minute listed hearing lasted 11.30am-4.30pm, with1 hour lunch. Judgement reading took 45mins. The judge read HUR's gumph in previous days. Our late Document & appearance threw a considerable spanner in both HUR's easy-expectations, and the Judge's thinking, as our arguments were too meritorious to be easily dismissed.
Constrained by time & resource, our Document was merely 6 (SIX) pages, but of absolute research-imbued quality. It dealt almost exclusively with the head count (50%) issue. It contained only a paragraph regarding the 'fairness' issue the judge declared his overriding concern. He was guided by HUR's rogue P6 standalone cash projection figures being less than P6 under Prax, by HUR's rogue 'risk assessment', and the 87%-88% achieved by value vote (the 75% vote - thus 'most people’ being happy' – despite HUR & Ker’s 46% holding of all shares making the 75% vote a formality). Arguing verbally on these ‘fairness’ issues without our Document (+ an evidence bundle) substantively addressing them was a mountain too high. The Judge made clear that though cognisant of the 2021 Judgements, he was bounden to be guided by the evidence bundles provided by HUR. Our lack of time and resource to systematically dismantle HUR’s figures and assessments aka 2021 gave the judge an easy and perhaps understandable way out.