The Evil Diaries: One Helluva Task by Way of Proof

Evil discusses the Tesco Shareholders Claims group, Monitise, Bowleven and Tyratech…

I may be missing something but I cannot for the life of me work out how the Tesco Shareholders Claims (sic) group stands to gain through its action against, presumably, Tesco.

There is no reference in today’s Daily Telegraph, at any rate, to claims against directors personally though I doubt if more than a £1m on this line of attack could be successfully claimed and that supposes evidence which in all probability is not to hand.

So any claim of potential consequence will have to be brought against the company. TSC is apparently after £5.6bn. This sum is computed by comparing where the share price stands now as opposed to where it would be in the opinion of TSC had inflated accounting not occurred. That is one helluva task by way of proof.

Further, any damages payable to TSC would be payable to all shareholders affected and the money would have to come out of Tesco itself. This would take shareholders back to where they started.

The only beneficiary of all this nonsense is the American firm of lawyers acting for TSC. There’s a surprise.

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Monitise (MONI) has stopped looking for somebody to take them over. This is presumably because they cannot persuade anybody that, long term, there is anything worth acquiring. The shares are currently down 3p at 15p on volume of 25m. It would indeed be a surprise if the share price were ever to recover to former glories.

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Bowleven (BLVN) continues to astound. It is capitalised, at 30p, at £100m. Yet it has net tangible assets of close on £200m and cash net of debt exceeds £100m. To justify this share price one would have to argue that the directors would wilfully destroy the assets. There is no evidence that they would seek such a result. Therefore, surely, Bowleven is an outright buy.

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Finally, Tyratech (TYR and TYRU – if buying, I would opt for the former and convert to TYRU – conversion takes time but Tyratech is a one year at least investment in any event) have announced yet another distributor of Vamousse, its “natural” headlice clearance application. This is CVS of the United States, which has 7,600 stores. I doubt if this is a fiddled RNS. Anyway, there are now 261m shares in issue and Tyratech is capitalised at £15m. That is not a lot if this product works. Seemingly, a lot of major distributors think it will since they value space very highly and do not take on dud products.