The proposed $28 million private equity deal to acquire struggling Brisbane firm Silver Chef is dead
Luke Tricket, hubby of swim champ Libby, has dealt a death blow to a proposed $28 million private equity deal to acquire a struggling Brisbane firm.
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DEAL DEAD
The proposed $28 million private equity deal to acquire struggling Brisbane firm Silver Chef is dead.
Fund manager Luke Trickett has revealed that his Blue Stamp Company would use its 19.99 per cent stake in the kitchen equipment leasing business to vote against the privatisation scheme at a meeting of shareholders next Friday.
That’s a blocking stake big enough to kill it off.
Trickett, the hubby of Olympic swimming star Libby, put forward an alternative scheme which would revitaize Silver Chef with a $50 million capital raising at 31 cents per share.
But that plan was quickly shot down by Silver Chef, which said it was a “highly conditional’’ and uncertain initiative that did not amount to a “superior proposal’’ for investors, who have been urged to accept the 70 cents per share offer from private equity group Next Capital.
Trickett remains undeterred despite the slapdown from Silver Chef bosses, who he claimed “failed to constructively engage’’ when he sent them his proposal earlier this week.
“We strongly believe the Next Capital scheme would unfairly deprive shareholders of the significant upside value inherent in the turnaround of Silver Chef’s performance,’’ he said.
The rebuff from the Silver Chef board came despite them “recently claiming they could not even raise $20 million from shareholders and as such needed to endorse the Next Capital scheme’’.
WEALTH DESTRUCTION
Trickett criticised the Next Capital plan for incorporating the “misaligned interests’’ of founder and chairman Allan English, who he noted “has overseen over $250 million of wealth destruction in recent years’’.
Under the Next Capital proposal, English would have retained his near 23 per cent stake in the business and stayed active in its operation.
That idea has been slammed by furious mum and dad investors, who have watched helplessly as the share price collapsed from more than $11 just three years ago and felt pressured to accept the 70 cent buyout offer. English declined to comment yesterday.
Silver Chef reported an $18.6 million full-year net loss this week and there are now doubts over whether the meeting to vote on the Next Capital plan will even proceed since the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Also unclear is the way forward for Silver Chef, which has traded for more than 30 years and now desperately needs a white knight.
The group has been in breach of debt covenants since June last year and has only survived because lenders granted waivers. But those waivers, only valid to the end of November, are conditional on the implementation of the now-scuttled Next Capital scheme.
A CHANGED WOMAN
The founder of a prominent national charity who spent six months behind bars for fraud says she’s a changed woman and has vowed to soldier on.
Brisbane businesswoman Rochelle Courtenay, who launched Share The Dignity to assist homeless women get sanitary goods, pleaded guilty in 2010 to ripping off $92,120 from a beauty supplies business over a three-year period.
“Over a decade ago I made a mistake and I served time for this. This is not who I am today,’’ Courtenay told us.
But recent chatter about her past has triggered a redesign of the charity’s website, with chair Susan Pearse now prominently featured and Courtenay relegated quite some ways down the page.
Pearse said the group has rigorous “checks and balances’’ on its finances and corporate partners have stayed on-board. But yesterday she could not explain why annual reports for the past two financial years had not yet been posted on the website.
Pearse is an author and consultant who launched her new-age “Mind Gardener’’ business after she claims to have met the Dalai Lama “after stalking (and introducing myself) to Richard Gere’’.
She says in an online bio that her search for meaning and happiness lead her to explore philosophy and neuroscience as well as “chakra and energy healing, kundalini dance, ancient feminine wisdom and shamanic traditions’’. OK then.
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