Canny EML Payments chairman Peter Martin beats the drop
Shares in EML Payments slid off a shelf on Tuesday following the release of gloomy full-year earnings that took the share price to depths unseen since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But one person who shrewdly sidestepped the plunge was Peter Martin, chairman of EML Payments – who had jettisoned 200,000 shares over the course of four days between April 7 and April 12, capturing a tidy sum of $550,643.61 in the process.
Back then, shares in the company were trading at far healthier prices of about $2.84 compared with the $1.66 – a drop of about 38 per cent – at which they were trading on Tuesday.
Had he waited like the rest of EML’s shareholders, Martin, an ex-chief executive at Rothschild Asset Management, would have lost roughly $214,000, so his decision to bail could be regarded as both timely and prudent.
We sought comment to establish his reasons for the sale of his shares but were told the chairman was offline with a case of Covid-19, brought on from recent travel abroad, and was less contactable than usual.
Conspicuous, too, was Canaccord Genuity’s gold-medal-worthy back-pedal on EML Payments late on Tuesday – which saw the financial services house slice its price target for the company to $2 per share – down some 55 per cent from $4.50.
Shareholder class action, regulatory issues ... potential legal action with the previous vendor ... poor cash conversion and ongoing earnings downgrades make it difficult for us to maintain a BUY recommendation,” wrote the investment bank’s analysts Owen Humphries and Seth Hoskins.
Quite a turn around in less than 24 hours. Then again stockbroking has been regarded as the world’s second oldest profession.
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Bennelong blues
The mud-fight continues in the federal seat of Bennelong where Labor candidate Jerome Laxale has been referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption over a grant awarded to a business once run by his partner, Jo Taranto.
Given that ICAC’s referral mechanism consists chiefly of a complaint form on a website, which can make a fricassee of anyone, we would caution against jumping too quickly upon any tempting conclusions. We are in the middle of a bitter election campaign, after all.
Margin Call revealed on Tuesday that Laxale had entered into a relationship with Taranto after splitting with his wife, Karyn, sometime after the 2019 state election when he staged an unsuccessful bid against NSW Liberal cabinet minister Victor Dominello for the seat of Ryde.
Family values played strongly in Laxale’s campaign against Dominello, a bachelor with a preternatural love of taking selfies. And the same act continues even now, with Laxale’s online campaign biography speaking loudly in its opening lines of his family being “firmly planted” in the Bennelong electorate.
A picture of harmony, of course, but not quite the case given the former Ryde mayor has separated from his wife and moved in with his partner, Taranto, who has been engaged by Ryde council to provide workshops to the community on single-use plastics and strategies for renewable waste.
Taranto has received a number of accolades from Ryde council in years gone by, including a nomination for citizen of the year in 2018, and an award for volunteer group of the year bestowed upon her organisation 5 for Ryde some months later.
And while there is no suggestion Laxale, who was mayor at the time, or Taranto were involved with each other during those heady days, or that any conflict of interest occurred, the complaint to ICAC does beg the question of when their initial friendship first evolved.
Margin Call attempted to put this to Laxale and Taranto but our questions went unanswered for a second day. A Labor campaign spokesman said the matter was a “grubby smear campaign” being orchestrated by the Liberal Party.
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Woollahra wowsers
Sour-mouthed residents of Ocean Street, Woollahra, threw almost every excuse they could muster at the developers behind a funeral parlour hoping to open up in the famously snooty neighbourhood.
Instructed to stay off the grass by Woollahra Council, JCP Construction and Development took their DA to the NSW Land and Environment Court, which overturned the council’s decision and permitted the parlour to be built in its proposed location – a gallery space for modern art.
Five residents gave evidence to the hearing offering objections ranging from the sober and sensible to the shamefully absurd.
One claimed the parlour would place the community “in proximity to dead people and will be a constant reminder of death”, as though the Stoics haven’t been practising this form of mindfulness for generations. Another said the proposal represented “bad Feng Shui” that would “unreasonably affect their enjoyment of their home”.
Concerns were also raised that “dead bodies may have infectious diseases”, while the welfare of an adjoining Italian restaurant, Cafe Nino, would suffer a “devastating” impact because “local residents do not want to dine near a funeral home”. Five stars.
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Labor love-in
Has anyone else noticed the observable drop-off in live press conferences being plugged on Labor’s Facebook page? We couldn’t help but wonder if recent events had forced the comrades at Labor HQ to issue some sort of ukase against them
It all started, we suspect, with Jason Clare’s press conference on Friday in which the Labor shadow minister filled in for Anthony Albanese – who is convalescing from Covid-19 exposure – and gave a performance that garnered impressive numbers of likes, shares and surprising levels of adulation.
“I do believe watching Jason Clare is now my guilty pleasure,” wrote one viewer. “Will make a great leader,” said another.
The next day, Labor’s treasury spokesman, Jim Chalmers, received an even greater ovation from Facebook’s users, with his interaction numbers easily exceeding the flatter, softer, less inspired figures often drawn by Albanese.
Someone must have obviously banged a table over at campaign headquarters, because since Sunday the Labor machine has broken with convention and stopped uploading its daily press conferences, even as they continue on their usual basis.
We asked why but received a stony, humourless silence.
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