By Tom Winnifrith | Wednesday 21 December 2016
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from ShareProphets). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
The increasingly deranged ramblings of convicted criminal Aidan Earley of Worthington (WRN) infamy get more bizarre with the poor man now going into bat on behalf of Cloudtag (CTAG). Poor Amit Ben Haim, with friends like this no wonder his shares are tanking.
The born again Christian, Saint Aidan of Banstead writes:
In Mr Winnifrith's podcast today he states that it is the intention of one of his colleagues to contact all the clients of Cloudtag's Nomad, in order to try to destroy the business relationship between Cairn and those clients, in order that Cairn will consider it too damaging to remain with Cloudtag, with the intention that Cloudtag's business will be destroyed because it will not be able to find a replacement Nomad (which Nomad would want to replace Cairn in the firing line?) - to the satisfaction of those who are short of the stock. Is that right or fair? Is it lawful? I don't think so. I do not know very much about Cloudtag or its prospects, or whether it is a good or bad company, but I do know that deliberately trying to destroy the company in this way is unjust.
This also exposes a fault line in the Nomad system when in essence you have a corporate serial killer on the loose, preying on entrepreneurial companies in the vulnerable development stage. By their very nature development stage companies are going to make mistakes, and many of their sales targets will be missed, but to label them as frauds and then try and destroy them in this way is pretty abhorrent. The real losers end up being the smaller investors who are locked into a private company unable to finance its business plan leading, inevitably, to the destruction of the company. It seems to me that whether or not a Nomad resigns has taken on a significance far greater than that originally intended when the AiM rules were first designed and which had not envisaged the activities of Mr Winnifirith. This activity is having a seriously destabilising effect on the smaller company sector as a whole.
Perhaps a solution might be to have a two tier AiM sector, as happens in other countries. For a company to join AIM it would need a Nomad, but if it subsequently loses its Nomad, it would be relegated to the "No Nomad" section of the market on a caveat emptor basis. This would at least address this distortion until Mr Winnifrith's activities are ended.
Hmmm.
A destabalising effect on the smaller company sector as a whole. That would be me pushing Earley's pet fraud Worthington into liquidation then. Nothing to do with it being a fraud.
Waseem Shakoor is not my colleague - we have no business relationship, I merely report on what market characters do.
Does Aidan think that companies should be allowed to make up "guaranteed" orders announce them, raise equity at inflated share prices and then admit there are no orders at all? Really? Is it acceptable, in the world of Aidan, for companies to lie to investors to get placings away? Judging by what went on at Worthington (now in liquidation) maybe Aidan does indeed think that is fair and that I am a prize rotter for exposing this.
Of course on AIM Nomads are the regulators. That is how AIM is meant to work. So old loony tunes Earley reckons that if a Nomad quits because a company tells a lie then shares in that company should carry on trading with no-one there to regulate it at all? What a sensible suggestion. What could possibly go wrong?
Am I a serial killer of corporates? No. I accuse relatively few companies of being frauds. Frauds go bust because they run out of cash. I can see why Mr Earley would not want journalists warning folks about fraudulent companies, about enterprises that don't bother filing annual accounts and tell lies, companies such as Worthington ( now in liquidation). But I cannot "kill a good company" for good companies generate cash and do not tell lies so I do not accuse them of telling lies.
I will say this for Mr Earley: He is not quite as mad as some of the BB morons who read his stuff and are today speculating that I live on the Isle of Man to allow me to be a corporate serial killer. With such folks it is hard to know where to start.
No doubt Mr Earley will be running an apology to Waseem for suggesting he is my colleague. Over and out from Bristol, UK.
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