I was a bit surprised by a story in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph to the effect that the total assets falling to be distributed by the administrators of Beaufort Securities was of the order of £500 million to £850 million but that the fee charged by PwC for this would be of the order of £100 million.
So I contacted a chum, a former stockbroker, who has money at Beaufort, and he agreed with me in having thought that this was a typo or some such. Nonetheless he put me on to some central character on the Creditors’ Committee who comments that the eventual figure will be much less and that in any event payments have to be approved by the Court. I should jolly well think so. Even so, I fear a staggering bill in relation to the assets falling to be distributed.
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I went over the outline of the case brought by Clear Leisure (LON:CLP) against Mr Justin Cooke with a member of the CLP management team. Mr Cooke sold a company to a subsidiary of WPP in 2012 where CLP had a stake – this stake is not yet clear. Astonishingly, the then CEO of CLP, Alfredo Villa, seems not to have followed through the receipt into CLP’s bank account CLP’s share of the proceeds. It seems to have been a sum of the order of £700,000 to £5 million. The real question is whether Mr Cooke has any money now to pay what should have been paid six years ago. Apparently, he has a number of governmentally sponsored appointments. Bankruptcy will surely put an end to those.
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Anyway, notwithstanding the uncertainty and the delay, I bought a further 2 million CLP. I’ll soon own the company in entirety simply through pigheadedness.