Patrick K Murphy
11 Mar 2015
Re: Closing of the FTO BB The board should remain open till the time the "extra 5p" is, or is not paid. The company was bought out cheaply in my opinion, especially if we do not get the 5p.What are we going to put the money into? I may pledge some of mine to support the Ancoats Dispensary Restoration appeal. It needs £35,000 or so. (I can't cover all that).This board has been a pleasure to use.
Roger Baron
11 Mar 2015
Re: I can empathise, but not sympathise ... ...and apologies for lowering the tone, but I think this talk of getting burnt is all a bit insensitive, what with our mate guy being in the room.
Roger Baron
11 Mar 2015
Re: I can empathise, but not sympathise ... Another fine morning of postings on this board. I will miss it.Anyone who disagrees, please spend a few minutes reading the Quindell discussions pages to see what we are losing apart from just our Fortune shares.
theprior
11 Mar 2015
Re: I can empathise, but not sympathise ....... " I sincerely hope that no-one gets burned here."Humph. Every shareholder apart from the Chiu's appear to have been 'burned' here so your hope is very disingenuous.Regards, TP
Guyfawkes
10 Mar 2015
...and agree to disagree Bravon, your last posting was extremely impressive; it was very well written, very clearly argued and fairly persuasive. However, having re-read all of the postings from mercersroad, I can't find any real examples of anger being expressed and certainly not any sense of 'toys being thrown out of a pram'. What I can detect from these postings - and this may be a matter of interpretation - is a sense of indignation about what really does appear to be a travesty. And that sense of indignation is shared by myself and by many, many others who have contributed to this bulletin board. That doesn't mean that we are unhappy or bitter or that we are looking to blame everyone and everything. What it does mean is that some people see an injustice and want to challenge that injustice. In the same way they would if they entered the casino you mention and found that the dice were loaded or the cards were marked. While I do agree that the main beneficiaries of legal action are usually the lawyers, nevertheless sometimes there are arrangements which can obviate the need for large expenditure. That said, I'm not going to defend mercersroad's arguments since this would clearly be inappropriate. So, as you appear to be saying, each to his or her own opinion and we can agree to disagree.
Bravon
10 Mar 2015
I can empathise, but not sympathise ....... I can certainly empathise with mercersroad and other sufferers, but I am finding it tough to sympathise. Sure I understand, but you cannot win the intellectual argument simply by feedingoff disappointment and blaming anyone who disagrees. Throwing toys out of the pram may act as a kind of comfort, but isn't there a risk of losing touch with reality ?I have invested in Fortune Oil for more than 20 years, was still investing shortly before the Scheme was announced, and might even have invested more than most. That does not qualify me to be right, but it does emphasise the point that someone can be just as deeply involved as you guys, but come to a different conclusion.In the invective of the 'penultimate aria' posting, everyone who disagrees is implicitly wrong. I am wrong, the Chius and all associates are wrong, the Takeover Panel is wrong, the system is wrong, and even the Judge is wrong. Well at least I'm not feeling isolated. Somehow the developing argument, if honestly you can call it that, also managed to drag-in the Banks (for rigging LIBOR and FX), Institutions in general (just for being institutions), then we got the mis-selling of mortgages, mis-selling of insurance and, for good measure, the hounding of whistleblowers. We heard about the "scam", 'cynical engineering', "fleecing the little man", 'silence money' .... whoaah .... take an aspirin and come back down to Earth ! Did that litany of disaffection honestly add anything positive to the discussion, or do I detect it becoming a bit political ? Maybe we just look at the World in different ways. I actually enjoy hearing different points of view, because that way you always learn, if you listen, but I have no time for insults or insinuations of wrongdoing where there is no reasonable foundation. I have myself chastised the FTO BoD for its love of opacity and complexity, but that is in the psyche. I have also complained that they have not gone far enough to enable PIs to understand what is going on. But, whilst lack of transparancy and helpfulness is irritating, it is hardly a crime. Fortunately or unfortunately, until they are changed we have to play by the rules 'as they are' and not 'as we would like them to be'. For goodness sake don't go into a casino, because the odds are against you and it's legal that way. Let's shrug off this feeling of 'entitlement' to stuff we are not actually entitled to; certainly shareholders own a slice of everything, but being able to realise the value is a very different concept from having it on the books.Anyway, enough. I have probably just annoyed you all some more, but I tend to be a pragmatist in these matters, and somehow that helps me to enjoy my investments much more ! Litigation generally doesn't pay, unless you are a lawyer, and I sincerely hope that no-one gets burned here.Good luck from my happy side of the Planet. B.
mercersroad
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria Hole in one, Guy Fawkes.
mercersroad
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria immaterial. There will always be a lien on Vitol which is the deus ex machine in this escapade.
Guyfawkes
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria I'm not a lawyer but I've been mugged by enough of them in the past to have a slight understanding of legal manoeuvrings. There's still at least one legal hearing in the offing before the process is complete. I would have thought, too, that in any case if an action has been raised that action would continue until the legal process has been exhausted irrespective of the individual or group's listing status. Otherwise anyone could at any time avoid litigation simply by changing their personal or business status.
Jag3
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria Mercersroad, are either FD or FTO still subject to English law? Neither are now listed in the UK.
mercersroad
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria Jag. Re the special dividend vote, I really can't remember. Certainly not for. I probably abstained as there really wasn't any point in opposing it.There were a number of ways you could have read that special dividend. I, as a shareholder since 1994 and recipient of very meagre returns thought of it as making up for lost time.My views on the special dividend have been well aired on ADVFN. Clearly Chiu and Co looked on it as the payoff for the crown jewels. It was a thoroughly irresponsible move that destabilised the share price (it now looks intentionally) at a time of maximum confusion. If they had retained most of it they would not have had to pull the annual dividend and would have been able to preserve shareholder value through the transition. This was clearly not their intention and the market read the runes and slaughtered the share price accordingly. The share price plunge became a self fulfilling prophecy. Or put more bluntly, a pretty brazen case of price manipulation.What this ‘hey ho, all’s fair in love and war’ approach fails to appreciate is we as minority shareholders still own our slice in those CGH shares. Now another conundrum is why Chiu and co, if they wanted to keep CGG all to themselves they didn’t set it up on their own and not involve Fortune – I have my theories on that – but they did, and we made our calculations accordingly.Clearly you, Jag, and exel on ADVFN and perhaps Bravon think the laws of the jungle apply. I think we should try the English judicial system since they obligingly registered here. We won’t have much to lose and we might have quite a lot to gain.
Phillip Reid
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria mercersroadAgreeing with Roger here, an excellent post with a fair summary of the trail that got us where we are today. I will try and add a few thoughts of my own. To me, everything was fair and above board with the BOD making great efforts to increase the value of the company, but the London stock-market failing every time to recognise the value of the company. When the last venture of selling the gas business - a gamble for them as well as us and don't forget, they put a lot of time and effort into developing said gas business - and taking a stake in CGH, did not work out with the vicissitudes of the London Market and after giving it some time to work out, they eventually came to the conclusion that maybe the market would never be fair to FTO, after all. Hence they devised a scheme to pay off the minority holders. I do believe they or at least one member of the BOD reads these BBs/discussion boards as do directors of other companies, many analysts and fund managers or others in the financial institutions (in contrast to what many people who post on these boards think - these discussions carry weight. These BBs are food and drink to the MMs, being used as a kind of barometer. IMHO). I know of a couple of company directors that I have communicated with directly who read the boards, and another one who actually contributed to iii postings in his capacity as a director.Once our BOD had decided to take the steps that they have done, they had to decide on figures, and on this BB, reading some of the posts it seemed that some s/hs were expecting to be sold down the river (which would have been an insult to the BOD in itself), and to me said postings were expecting to be sold out for something like 4/5 or 6p a share - that is when I began to get a bit nervous about my holding. Anyway reading that, they would think that 10p would be a fairly acceptable take-out price, and if they added another possibility a bit of jam on top (maybe) - then they devised this ill thought out CVR, which as mercersroad says, is an insult to the intelligence of shareholders.Maybe I should stop there, but would just add that I have been in touch with mercersroad and know he is the genuine article (well worth getting in touch with if you haven't). Also would say that I have been out of the loop, having been back to the UK (3 weeks) recently and living in hotels for about a month or more, where I am very nervous of even logging on to the internet (both in China and UK), because my bank account was defrauded (by debit card which was in my possession) just after the last trip to the UK in the summer when I booked everything online - also had to have a new hard disk on my computer when back in the UK. My bank recompensed me, but they will also be watching me carefully now - that's the way of the world.Regards to a
Roger Baron
10 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria An angry man! what's wrong with being angry?(an angry man with a plan and a team of lawyers)
r21442
09 Mar 2015
Re: The fat lady's penultimate aria Hong Kong or Beijing? If you are going to lay a cable you don't do it in your back yard.
Nunquam
05 Mar 2015
Jag3. I am in the Algarve at the moment. The weather is fine 
