Member Info for Spacman

thin gruel from the company so far. this, and a poster the other week telling us that old geezers carrying a bit of timber are susceptible to covid.

seems like the four sackings at the end of march probably gave them around a £million to extend the cash runway just enough in the going concern spreadsheet that the auditors were poring over.

it's clear that the company has neither control nor much influence over its current strategy. this is an r&d organisation that hasn't initiated a trial for over 4 years.

if the annual report next week doesn't outline a clear way forward (i.e. sale) then it's time to change the ceo and get a fresh face in that bp will do business with. it's the intransigence of the bod that's holding back a £2+ per share buy-out... nothing much in that for the directors, but salvation for shareholders. will they do the right and proper thing though?

or will they surprise us yet? we can only hope. what a ****show it's been for the past two and a half years. still, marsden's pocketed £30k every month, so somebody's smiling.

Surely there has to be an RNS on Monday ahead of this?

Does anyone know what this engagement entails, will any of the four named employees be in attendance and subject to questioning? Given how Synairgen (we think) sought to gag Julia Tree of the UKHSA, they aren't going to run the risk of letting their own staff speak freely about future prospects when this information hasn't been released to the market, are they?

Doc83, Marsden has definitely been contemptuous of shareholders - whatever NDAs are in play, they won't preclude Synairgen describing strategy and progress, they just prevent names being disclosed. Absolute silence for a public company is ridiculous.

SSH still has the power to decide the fate here. Any organisation that wants to keep or acquire the science needs the originator's blessing and certainly not opposition. I think he can still call it here. TFG seem to be aware that Marsden and Shaw have assiduously maintained this familial bond, since they couldn't force a SPAC exit for themselves when Marsden et al spurned the best efforts of Morgan Stanley, Rick Bright, Ray Jordan etc.

The Annual Report is due by no later than three weeks on Friday. Another three weeks after that is the latest possible date for the AGM.

If the trials don’t commence in H1 then the company has achieved nothing over the past year, and unless there is an announcement soon then the Annual Report will be pretty vacuous, since any material news has to be RNS’d and can’t just be “saved up” for the AR.

If there is still no news (either of the trials commencing or of a corporate transaction) between publication of the AR and the AGM then it’s reasonable to start drawing conclusions. An inability to move any further forward two years after the Sprinter failure means that the company is not capable of progressing this great science into clinical & commercial application.

When progress is evidently unattainable the company has to stop trying to buck the market and accept the natural order of the pharma value chain. If they do not have the industry control/influence to bring all the participants together to get trials going, then it’s time to move the agenda on to a buy-out by BP.

If the status quo does remain come the AGM, then SSH must be encouraged to break the familial bonds of the past 20 years, tell Simon Shaw and Richard Marsden that Synairgen’s time is up, and insist on an orderly transfer to BP.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed and see what the next few weeks bring, but if it’s nothing, then as shareholders we need to look to SSH for salvation of our investment and his science.

Correction - the 2022 Annual Report was signed off by BDO in May 2023 (not 2022 of course). Apologies.

Just gone back and checked - the 2022 Annual Report (that BDO signed off on in May 2022) stated that the P2 trials would commence in H2 2023. It would be interesting to understand what future projections (which underpin the Going Concern assessment) have been provided by the company to BDO for the audit this year, and how much confidence BDO have in those.

It's probably going to take a compliance issue like this to force the BoD's hand to undertake a transaction. Otherwise you've got a "law unto himself" CEO happy to keep taking a £350k package for "leading" an organisation that has no trials to run, no customers to serve, no manufacturing to do, no communications to bother about.. but 30 staff to help out just in case.

You really couldn't make it up.

Gunto - the unknown (to us) is the cost of the trials, and if the company is still pre-revenue come the start of Q2 2026 which is what your scenario is suggesting, then all that will be affecting the auditors' confidence in the Going Concern stress-testing they're doing. Do you think BDO have great confidence in the BoD? I doubt it.

Mr Costs - you're right, they could announce cessation of trials intent and then that is a Business Plan (if that's what you can still call it) they can certainly deliver on. But that decision (which would need to be RNS'd as it's a material change in a company that then becomes dormant save for paying salaries) is a game-changer in itself... suddenly the company is saying there are no prospects for ever creating a revenue stream. I'm not a company law expert, but a basic understanding of fiduciary duty would suggest that the directors are then duty-bound to put the company or its assets up for sale to realise value for the shareholders.

AIMHO. DYOR.

Thanks for your expectations timeline Gunto. I don't think that Business Plan timeline would pass the Going Concern test they're possibly up against with the auditors currently, unless there's some funding solution, JV etc. announcement about to come.

Gunto - of course TFG will be totally supportive of the management until the day they they aren't. In a heartbeat they will pounce, they can pull over £100m back potentially, they won't just let things fester with an inadequate management.

The natural order here is that SNG001 should now be in the hands of a BP that has done hundreds of thousands of P2's and P3's. By contrast the Synairgen team, with the exception of Mankowski, have done a handful. Even Mankowski has infinitesimal experience by comparison to the combined institutional history of a BP. I hope SSH is realising that it's time to move this on.

Well then Gunto, hopefully TFG now move to dissolve the BoD and get the company auctioned off to BP and some money back to shareholders.

J&J might just pay $400m for full control of a clean Synairgen without the deadweight of Marsden et al.

Tommy, you seem to have changed your tune a bit from "news will be soon" two months ago? Yes, I got wind of the same "info" then, which simply confirms that certain members of the Synairgen BoD will say anything to appease in the moment (remember their promise to improve comms at the last AGM) or in the case of the CEO, abdicate responsibility and say absolutely nothing. All of it is pathetic.

However, they may be able to fool some of the people some of the time etc. but they need the accounts signing off within the next five weeks and BDO won't be so easily appeased over the Going Concern issue. Synairgen will have to say something soon.

Hopefully the recent organisational restructuring means a JV is in the offing.

GLALTHs

TP - it's this person:

https://theorg.com/org/synairgen-plc/org-chart/hazel-pitt

The Quality Director was actually recruited as recently as December 2022, which supports the guess that they were still trying to keep the full-service pharma entity idea alive through a pivot to the US at that time (but obviously not for the manufacturing part). Of course we'll never know because the company never explains anything, probably because Marsden has no substantive vision but just a vague dream of the future.

Yes it's favourable but it's very much a sideshow at this point in time. It's what's happening to those things that the company is in control of, front-and-centre, right now, that we need to understand.

Synairgen have just terminated the Quality Director which might suggest that manufacturing capability is no longer their focus, following on from dropping the commercial side. If they are retrenching into R&D and licensing out SNG001 to a third party or through a JV, great. People who talk about resisting a JV and sharing the pie only post-P2, do you really want to risk having 100% of nothing, or would you prefer X% of something? I would rather see a hike in the SP now than trust Marsden & Co. to deliver something bigger, later, on their own.

With any luck, the potential Going Concern audit qualification problem will force a funding solution to be announced pretty shortly.

Fruits, that's seven months ago, so what's your interpretation?

The Stock Exchange will be none too pleased with a member that has a strategy of non-communication risking huge volatility. They encourage controlled dialogue between companies and the market. Suspect Consilium were scrabbling around to silence the UKHSA person and then get a message out on LinkedIn ("Wot's that?" asked Marsden). Note they shied away from Twitter/X where derision seems to follows any of their posts, usually referencing Marsden's £360k early retirement annuity.

Ragz - thanks for sharing.

Reactive messaging forced upon them after the UKHSA employee tweets then removes her tweet yesterday (oh dear...). All comes with their stupid blanket policy of radio silence.

Still, all good news, and they have to issue a directors report no later than 21 days before the AGM, so they can't keep us in the dark forever.

Brysoa - thanks for the clarification.

It's difficult to see how they field the question, "So what are the next steps?" tomorrow when nothing has been announced to the market. so a pre-emptive RNS would seem reasonable, unless there is no Q&A or any sort of dialogue expected. The word "conference" might be a clue here...