Member Info for Toonman

Although it says he resigned I am sure he was sacked. He will have signed a compromise agreement which means he can’t sue for unfair dismissal and in return he gets a decent payoff. The fact that it was with immediate effect plus the chairman’s comments about the departure (now is the right time etc) are a clear sign that this was a sacking imo.

CFO knows where the bodies are buried - as it were! However I would not be surprised if CFO is gone within a few months. The new CEO will probably want his own choice in that role.

Mursell sacked with immediate effect. I don't think the chairman had much choice really. There's been too little transparency on what the true financial position is.

f15jcm - your gripe about net debt. What makes it worse is that the directors were paid bonuses based on the level of net debt that is stated in the audited year end accounts. Below £200 million was the target as stated in the 2018 annual report. And the target was hit and triggered the bonuses.

Thanks Nige. You are correct, and I was casually lumping some companies that build things into the same category! Perhaps it would be a better fit to put companies who derive the majority of their income from the UK into the same bracket. And as far as I can see the current market sentiment is not favourable. As you say the PSN balance sheet is strong and the dividend returns are stellar. I read somewhere that this share is being shorted but I cannot find any evidence of that. The current economic uncertainty is creating a very good buying opportunity here.

rxdav - there have been a number of “situations” in this sector recently. Obviously Carillion was an extreme example but at the end of last week Kier had an unexpected rights issue that has tanked their shares. Balfour Beatty also has had its problems. None of those companies are identical as far as what they do but they are all identified as being in the construction industry. Kier have recently said that banks are now unwilling to extend facilities to companies who operate in this sector. That plus the Brexit confusion is why the PSN share price is where it is at present. I do agree with your opinion on the PSN financials and think this is a share worth watching, as usual luck and “skill” are required for getting the right entry point of course!

PS - your comment on exstatex is agreed. However I am curious about these “royalist masons” and I will attempt to penetrate their inner circle (as it were). If I get anywhere I will let you know.

Yes I read it. So what? It was written back in July, and there has been no more heard about it since. It was clearly dealt with by Paypoint.

Decent results today - and they include another special dividend. The market seems happy enough this morning.

They do not provide energy to anyone - merely a means to pay for it. They had an outage, sorted it and apologised. Shit happens in any business, I can’t see any suggestion that the government have not had their answers but I may have missed something?

They have closed a tiny non core part of their business and not told us about it. Utter bastards.

Don’t think this company is for you. Stay well clear..

Be interesting to see what the results are like. I am not so sure about the points you make about the company not disclosing things to the shareholders. The Irish exit represented less than 1% of their business so it is hardly material. I think the other issue you refer to was dealt with in the company's trading update on 26th July as follows:

"Following the quarter end, we had a technical incident on Saturday 21 July 2018 that impacted, at peak, approximately one-third of our retail terminal estate. During this period, customers were able to undertake services at alternative local sites during the day as we were able to continue to provide coverage across our network to 98% of households. We fully restored services during the course of the day and are confident that it was a one-off, isolated incident and we are sorry for any inconvenience that the outage caused to our retailers and their customers during the affected time."

exstatex - thanks for the effort. You have posted the some stuff twice now. Why not try it again - third time lucky and all
that....

Agree. Anyone who thinks this is going bust should start by having a look at the company’s balance sheet, they are sitting on over a £billion of cash!

Yes - me too.

Genuine question - what evidence have you got that this share is being shorted? The only indication I can find is that less than 0.5% of the shares are short.

XEL was not and is not worthless. It has several hundred million barrels of oil in the North Sea at a site called Bentley. The trouble is it is now owned by its former bondholders and not by its former shareholders. The company could not repay the debt owed to its bondholders and the bondholders would not extend the debt beyond its maturity date. The price of oil was very low at the time and no one was interested in providing alternative finance so the company was forced to restructure and the bondholders converted their debt into equity - and the shareholders were wiped out. XEL will make a lot of money for its owners. A similar thing happened at GKP except that the shareholders were left with 10% of the company as opposed to nothing.

Currently about 9%. May and September.Yes. No.

That is indeed correct. It would not be a rights issue if it wasn't offered to every single shareholder - it would be a placing.

The company has a philosophy of distributing its profits as dividend. It is worth looking at the company's detailed accounts. The adjusted EPS for 2017 was about 11p roughly equal to the dividend. The other things worth noting are firstly that the company has no debt and at the 2017 year end was sitting on �36million in cash. Secondly it translated 91% of its turnover into cash - which is not bad at all.

Compass - There was a spike after the excellent results back in August, but it is now some weeks later and ALD has suddenly started to leap. I suspect your latter option is the case.

Good upward movement this month. Looks as though the market is re-rating this share - or is something else going on here?

I too am heavily into this company. Daisyp your post makes a lot of sense and goes a long way towards explaining the share price movement in recent months.