Member Info for Skindle

That’s a relief. Now might be a good moment to buy as it would appear that the SPD grip is being released. Strange time to release this RNS, 17.19 on the 30th April. I would have expected this announcement after 13.00 on Friday 3rd May. Why release today ?

I can’t find any indicative guidance as to what happens after 1pm on Friday. It is quite clear that all shareholders have taken the advice of the board to take no action so Sports Direct will complete this part of the mandatory offer holding 37.83% of our shares. My concern is that this situation could go on for months if SPD are permitted to raise their offer by a few pence per share, if we keep having to go through this process each time a new offer is made. A recent report suggested that SPD were as much as £500m down on their investments in Game, Findel, Debenhams, Goals etc.

Given what we know of the likely revenue and PBT for 2018/19, 300 pence a share is a very reasonable valuation of the business. On this basis SPD would need to come up with another £161m to takeover the business completely. Can they really afford to do this now that Debenhams have lost them their last two years PBT.

If Sports Direct were to raise their offer on Friday to say £1.75 would we have to go through the sixty day process again even though the increased offer would more than likely be rejected ?

I appreciate your optimism 1GW_, but I maintain that Sports Direct will never pay a fair price for Findel. Hopefully the 3rd May will see an end to this charade and the share price will resume free movement that fairly reflects our financial performance.

There is one aspect that Sports Direct crave In all of the companies that they are invested in and that is control. The Debenhams situation proved to Mr Ashley that despite his 29.9% shareholding, he had no control of the direction of the business because he did not have a seat on the board. Our previous incumbents campaigned successfully to stop Mr Ashley and his nominated representative, Mr Gardner from assuming a seat on our board. I now realise how important this action was.

Despite his 37.83% holding in Findel, Sports Direct still do not control the direction of our business. The board currently enjoy the unanimous support of the non Sports Direct shareholders. This could quickly change if the board are harbouring some bad news. Sports Direct would act swiftly to install one of their representatives onto our board to help conclude the purchase of the business at a significant discount to market value.

I hope you are right in your end of trading year statement prediction as this would remove any suspicion that bad news is being held back. Roll on Friday 3rd May.

I can’t find a single example of SPD paying anything like true market value for anything, I am not therefore optimistic of a positive conclusion to this situation.

So during the period between the 9th and 24th April, Sports Direct received a whopping 6,113 additional shares bringing their new total up to 32,703,762 or 37.83%. You can clearly see the justification for the offer extension !!!

253.002 shares have changed hands since the 9th April so it would be fair to assume that Sports Direct can claim to own no more than 38% of the total number of shares currently in existence. So what action will SPD take today ? My guess is they will extend the £1.61 offer again to the 4th May in their effort to continue to frustrate the share price in the hope that the board release a negative year end trading statement.

Well, I am completely baffled by this situation. Why would you not release your end of year trading statement (which we are led to believe is positive) before Easter in line with last year, in the face of an unsolicited and opportunistic mandatory offer ? Answers on a postcard please !!!

If the usual financial year end trading statement is not released tomorrow, my suspicion that the board are harbouring some bad news will grow. It would make sense to hold back on any bad news until after the next deadline date of the 24th April. We also still await confirmation of the release date of the final results.

This whole mandatory offer process, while in place to protect shareholders is actually proving to work against shareholders of Findel. Virtually every shareholder in the company is currently sitting on a paper loss, including Sports Direct.

Interesting RNS yesterday entitled as above. Maybe the board of SPD should take a look a long hard look at their actions and realise that they are doing exactly what they suggest the board of directors at Debenhams did to them over at Findel. By whatever means, the barrow boy and his fellow thugs have successfully halved our share price at Findel to try to acquire us at a ridiculous knockdown price. For the first time Ashley has experienced the pain of losing money as a shareholder of a business and he don’t like it. If as the RNS suggests SPD hold large and small fellow shareholders in high regard, give us an offer that fairly reflects the value of our business. I’ll give you a clue, it starts with a 3 ! We will not be holding our breath, and we won’t be selling our shares for the derisory £1.61 mandatory offer.

Sports Direct yesterday released the statement below. A very bitter statement expressing their anger at the board of Debenhams for the course of action they chose to take. Frankly, the board had nothing to do with the final decision, it was the lenders who dictated the final decision.

It was the second paragraph that left aghast at its hypocrisy. Sports Direct have no regard for fellow shareholders unless they comply with their wishes. SPD have currently completely destroyed shareholder value at Findel, but they have chosen to ignore this fact. They really are the bullying thugs of the business world.

“Further to this morning's announcement of a new share buyback programme, the board of Sports Direct believes our share buybacks are an important mechanism for maintaining an efficient but robust balance sheet for the benefit of our shareholders, whose support, including during the Debenhams refinancing process, we continue to appreciate.

Our understanding of the importance of our shareholders and our actions towards them are in complete contrast to the actions of the board of Debenhams, past and present, whereby they ignored the wishes of shareholders, both major and minor, and offers of support, and completely destroyed shareholder value”

A very sad case of a board of directors shamelessly enjoying a life style at the expense of their shareholders.

Ejackson, the difference of course is that he never actually made an offer for Debenhams despite the pretence. It is the mandatory offer that is anchoring our share price to the offer price, the fact that SPD have chosen to extend the offer of acceptance deadline is the scandal. With such a low take up of the offer, SPD should not be permitted to extend the deadline further as this whole process is clearly affecting the movement of our share price.

None of our larger shareholders of one per cent and above has accepted the mandatory offer. Norges Bank has reduced by 0.79 per cent in recent weeks, can we assume that the 0.98 per cent that SPD has managed to buy is from the Norges sale ?

Elsewhere the former barrow boy claims that the Debenhams situation is a national scandal. Does that qualify our situation at Findel as a local scandal ?

SPD has managed to squeeze another 0.98% of shares from misguided Findel shareholders. As a result of this SPD is extending the date by which shareholders can accept their mandatory offer to 1pm on the 24th April. Now over to our board of directors to respond with a financial year end update to lift the share price away from the offer price of £1.61.

I’ve seen enough. 04 Jun 2018 08:29
I first invested on the 2nd January (2018) this year after taking Christmas to look further into the very encouraging RNS released just before. I dipped my toe in the water with 5000 shares. I bought a further 45,000 shares at the end of March after the announcement of the sale of a piece of kit to the value of $4.5m and the news that the “big one” was about to be confirmed. This left me at an average price of just over 25 pence per share. The grant of share options on Friday however following hot on the heels of another year of a pre tax loss confirms for me that the board of directors are laughing in the faces of shareholders who continue to fund their very comfortable life style. I cannot now see any hope of Iranian contracts converting to revenue while Mr Trump in in office. Had I known on the 2nd January that these big contracts were Iran based I would not have invested in the first place. The opaque nature of the way this board releases its information is verging on deception in my opinion. I will sell my shares in this sham of a company by Tuesday evening of this week and invest what is left into a company that is going to report a pre tax profit on Wednesday morning. Good luck to all shareholders of WSG I hope you are more successful than I have been.

In previous years these are the dates that the board have released their statements -

17 April 2018
6 April 2017
24 March 2016
31 March 2015
1 April 2014
8 April 2013.

Given the potential takeover threat, I really think the board should be updating shareholders now that the 2018/19 financial year is complete.

I don’t think Sports Direct really wanted to take the whole of the business over. I believe they just couldn’t resist another six million shares at such an extraordinarily low price. This of course compelled them to make a mandatory offer as they crossed the thirty per cent threshold. To offer the lowest price that they could get away with indicated to me that they had not really intended to buy the business, they had merely taken the opportunity to buy some very under priced shares in a very strong business.

For our board to indicate such a firm price is I think our board making sure that this mandatory offer process is concluded next Tuesday without further doubt. It is common knowledge that Sports Direct do not pay full market price for anyone or anything. When all our shareholders large and small formally reject this ridiculous offer next week we can all be certain that there will be no further counter offers.

Finally I am rather hoping that the board issue their end of year trading update this week just to endorse how low this mandatory offer really is.

I’m a great admirer of our Mr East but can’t help thinking that the drive to cut costs is having a detrimental effect on the end product.