Month: September 2006

Remnant Media, owners of SMD Publishing, are going to have some fun tomorrow at an extraordinary general meeting, apparently.

A former director of Remnant Media, which runs the porn publishing empire once owned by Richard Desmond, is urging shareholders to vote down proposals to increase its share capital at tomorrow’s extraordinary meeting.

Anthony Edwards, a Remnant Media director until last year, has written to fellow shareholders encouraging them to vote against two of the three resolutions because he believes they “raise serious issues requiring response by the directors”.

Interesting, he also points out the following:

[Remnant pledged] – at the annual meeting last October – to provide a quarterly financial update, [which] had not been honoured. No information has been issued since January, he says. Remnant said it would provide an update at the meeting.

But Mr Edwards is concerned this may not cover the financial position. “The last annual accounts issued were for the period ending December 2004 at the AGM on October 4, 2005. Why isn’t the meeting an AGM with presentation of full accounts for the year ending December 31, 2005? I believe the answer is simply to avoid providing financial information that would have to be made available at an AGM,” he said.

Mr Edwards says he “wants to ensure all shareholders are treated equally and fairly, with full disclosure of information”. He questions why Remnant is proposing to allot 5m new shares to Mr Robinson at 10p. When Remnant raised cash from new investors in 2004 it was at 32.5p a share. Mr Edwards asks: “Why is he the only shareholder offered the opportunity to increase his investment in the company?”

Just spoken to Chris Coles at BDO Stoy Hayward again about payments from the Highbury ring-fenced fund. This has the money intended to go to those who did work for Highbury at the start of the year, before it went into receivership. Here’s the latest info:

BDO Stoy Haward and Ernst & Young are still in the process of making the application to the court to make BDO the administrator of this fund. He’s expecting that to go through this month, although they don’t have a court date yet.

The letter that tells everyone about what’s happening is due to go out in the next day or so. They’ve been trying to make sure the list of people it goes to is as complete as possible – apparently, the list of people in the “trust document” is very long.

Once court confirmation comes through, they’ll be able to look through individual claims. Coles hopes to be able to do this as quickly as possible, although there a few claims and technical issues that might mean it takes “a little while” to review them all. He does say, however, that the company “has no real interest in dragging out” the process. “It’ll make life easier if we make the distribution as soon as possible.”