The Evil Diaries: Phosphorus Bonds and William Hill

Rather more than a year ago I here considered Phosphorus bonds. These were issued by that company which itself served as a holding company for Phones4U. Shortly after the £200m fundraise that very sum was sent up to its very own holding company BC Partners. And not long after that the entire structure collapsed.

Even more extraordinarily it was not possible to circularise Phosphorus bondholders since there was no publicly available register. I still cannot understand how this can possibly be.

At the time I took along an extremely competent solicitor pal to a family office in Berkeley Square so that he could listen to my possibly cackhanded description of matters at Phosphorus and then comment. He said it was complicated but did not rule out a successful claim. Legal fees would have been several hundreds of thousands of pounds, possibly millions. Therefore nothing happened. BC Partners could breathe again.

However, I learnt yesterday that PwC have issued a report into the position of Phones4U bondholders. Included in that report is, I am told, comment that an extensive review of emails for Phones4U and Phosphorus discloses interesting comment and, as a result, expert witnesses have been appointed and there has been pre-action correspondence.

To what effect, I have no idea yet. At the time perhaps eighteen months ago I bought £800,000 of Phosphorus bonds at 4p in the £. And I had written them off. I am not now so sure and reckon that a bet at 10p in the £ might work. Readers with north of £25,000 to gamble may care to approach Guy Butler Limited: they are the experts.

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Takeover talks as between Rank and 888 on the one hand and William Hill (WMH) on the other yesterday broke down. WMH retired to 303p. I cannot understand why. WMH are a stonking buy.