Good afternoon!

What a fascinating evening at Mello Beckenham last night, and great to see so many friends there! The draught Peroni is just magnificent at Sea Salt restaurant, it's worth going just for the beer. The barman told me it's that good because he is so fastidious about cleaning the pipes.

Lakehouse (LON:LAKE)

(at the time of writing, I hold a long position in this share)

Management of Lakehouse (LON:LAKE) (CEO Stuart Black, and CFO Jeremy Simpson) came along and gave a presentation, and fielded questions in a lively Q&A session. I think they deserve great credit for coming along to speak to investors in such difficult circumstances - the founder has teamed up with Slater Investments to call an EGM to oust the NEDs, so this was a hot topic of discussion last night.

As I pointed out to the CEO, Slater Investments are a highly respected firm, so if they want to oust NEDs, then something really must be up. I thought the response was excellent actually - as they pointed out, there's no way that the company (or other shareholders) can possibly accept an attempt to oust independent NEDs, and replace them with appointees of two shareholders. The whole point of NEDs is that they're independent, and can't be appointees of particular shareholders. That's a totally valid point, which I accepted.

There's definitely a concern that the company is racking up heavy costs with advisers, dealing with the board room issues. So I hope this is dealt with quickly, and sensibly. It's certainly a major distraction for everyone, and has got to be sorted out.

Overall I thought the Directors didn't come over particularly well - mainly because the session was being filmed, and I think this made them clam up - there were clearly things they wanted to say, but couldn't. So I think most of us felt a bit mystified & frustrated by what's going on at the company, and that we've only been told part of the story.

That said, there were some useful snippets in the discussion, and I sat next to the CEO over dinner, and had a good chat with him. We discussed how the city firms tend to float companies with large, lumpy shareholdings placed with Institutions, in order to earn their huge fees for as little work as possible. The trouble is,…

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