Member Info for Timmit

Agreed - cash more useful to pay off loans (or bond holders) than book debt in a balance sheet, gives CLP more options..

1.9M euros already in balance sheet as owing so, yes you can do more with the cash when it comes but this isn’t “fresh” money like any of the court claims will be. I was more referring to the expectation of when the money would be received - Spary1 has his expectations at the upper end of the optimistic end of the scale and that needs everything to line up perfectly so probably not the most reasonable timescale (these are Italian Court proceedings...)

spary1, don’t think you’re doing yourself any favours with that kind of prediction - great if it happens but far from a slam dunk certainty getting all the eagles landing in November...

Boom123, you buy the debt and it is assigned to you. You're not in business are you? This happens with Debt Collectors, Factoring Companies and numerous other financial arrangements where you assign the debt to a third party. Banks do it, even HMRC does it...

Hi turnthecorner, I didn’t take it as that - I thought I might just offer some explanation to the wider audience why the person who went to the AGM hadn’t said a great deal about it. Some may have felt that I was just playing cards close to my chest so my comment was unrelated to your question. Sorry for any confusion..:-)

Hi RachelsDad, the black and white is that CLP owned 84.04% of Mediapolis as stated but as soon as Mediapolis entered bankruptcy proceedings that's where the charges held over the property come into play. So the finance company these villas were secured by had first call on their proceeds - as I understand it they won't get back all they are owed...

Hi turnthecorner, I would state from the outset that I have only, up till now, met with the directors at AGMs or EGMs so I don't "have their ear" any more that the other folks on here. The signal from the AGM was that the criminal case proceeding against the former management of Sosushi considerably strengthened CLP's case - observers might think that for their behaviour to be criminal enough for an Italian court to prosecute them it must be bad! I couldn't possibly comment...

Some of the information I heard at the AGM I didn't post either because it was very technical (legal wranglings over the Mediapolis properties including villas) or I could only be told limited information which didn't allow a conclusion to be reached (Crypto). Nothing was market sensitive as it was all in the public domain (much of it in the Italian public domain).

I know what you mean linandy1. I know it's an "if only" but in any other country CLP would have paid off its creditor, negotiated huge discount on the villa bank debt and would be sitting pretty on big assets with reduced debt. NAV just for the land would be many times the market cap as it is now...

It also came out at the AGM (not market sensitive because it didn't happen) that CLP had an agreement ready for signature to buy back the debt on the villas from the bank holding the charge on them at huge discount but didn't go ahead with it due to the lack of transparency from the court proceedings over whether the revised ownership would be recognised.

I went this year KNIGELK. Nobody else, no other shareholders that are not officers of he company...

They are/were owned by Mediapolis but there was a charge over them with a bank. You have to go back quite a few years but it is mentioned (Unicredit rings a bell - certainly something like that...).

Some of the discussion at the AGM about the Mediapolis situation was interesting if quite technical. This isn’t price sensitive as it will be in the public domain but in Italian. It’s not a liquidation as I had thought but a bankruptcy - this has some technical differences including the behaviour we saw at the auction and there was a facet about who was initiating the bankruptcy being allowed to proceed in that fashion - very different to how we would understand a corporate liquidation in the UK.

Not sure it is price sensitive info. The deadline as announced for an appeal came and went and they DIDN’T announce that they were going to appeal. They felt that would suffice, I disagreed.

There won’t be an announcement about the auction appeal. They decided not to appeal after taking legal advice and just let the clock run out...

The 64 Bit Ltd partner is not a UK company, it is registered in Malta. There's no connection between the two that I am aware of.

I'm going, I know Rusty is hoping to be there - anyone else?

Hi LtdAxis, because Mediapolis was a subsidiary of CLP, the benefit realised from buying Mediapolis' debts at a discount stayed in CLP and Clear Leisure 2017 Ltd as they had purchased the debts. Mediapolis would still showing as owing the higher amounts but to CLP and Clear Leisure 2017 Ltd instead of an assortment of banks etc. So, the liquidator will have to treat those amounts as real values - he can't rationalise that, as CLP etc purchased them at a discount, they aren't due as much back. It truly is a shame that FG didn't get the full benefit of his debt negotiations as the improvement to the balance sheet prior to Mediapolis' liquidation was amazing...

Of course there's no easy way of working out when the £300k legal & insurance costs in the Justin Cooke case were incurred but the admin costs in 2018 H1 accounts were about 330k Euros more than the 2017 H1 accounts.

So, although there was other ongoing legal actions taking place with Mediapolis, Sipiem & SoSushi, a big chunk of the insurance policy and lawyers fees in the Justin Cooke case may well have already been stated in the interim accounts. This would mean that most of the £1.15M settlement might make its way to the bottom line in H2 2018...

Linandy, to bid at an auction you normally need to have physical cash to part with for a couple of months until you get it back again from the auction house. CLP didn’t have the funds in cash. The CLP subsidiary Clear Leisure 2017 had applied to have the title transferred to them as they had first charge over the property. This would have been for a amount far in excess of what was achieved at auction. Under normal circumstances a liquidator tried to achieve the most money from an asset but in this instance chose to accept a low ball bid - my understanding is that the Clear Leisure offer should have counted as a bid as it was a much higher offer than the successful bidder offered.

Apparently not...