Good morning! The lack of communication over the suspension of Silverdell (LON:SID suspended) really has been shocking, and to a certain extent reinforces my belief that private shareholders are regarded as an after-thought, and are last in the queue to find out what's happening when something goes wrong, and to have our interests considered and defended. It's not good enough - the information vacuum here has been appalling, since the shares were suspended on 2 Jul 2013.
The company or its NOMAD still haven't properly informed private shareholders as to what actually happened, whereby part of the group fell into Administration and the shares were suspended on 2 Jul 2013. Here we are just over two months later, and there still has not been a clear explanation as to what happened, why, and what is being done about it. Suppliers and employees were thanked for their "patience & forbearance", leaving many shareholders wondering why, as the owners of the business, they have been largely ignored!
Anyway, this is clearly a unique situation - it's not a normal insolvency, because the existing Bank, HSBC, have been helpful in refinancing the Group, in order to enable it to buy back the business & assets of its subsidiary from the Administrator. So either there was some enormous liability which emerged, and had to be ring-fenced by putting Kitsons into Administration, or (as I've always believed seems more likely) the whole thing was some gigantic cock-up, over a Winding Up Petition for a relatively trivial amount of money, which was paid but apparently the Winding Up Petition not withdrawn for some reason or other.
I believe that shareholders will probably do alright in the end here, with the shares likely to come back from Suspension, with an equity fund-raising being needed fairly urgently one would imagine, to restore confidence and repay the Bank the bridging finance they have provided. Clearly though management credibility is shot to bits, and recognising that fact, the CFO (Chief Financial Officer - I see we are slowly adopting the Americanism [don't we always, eventually?!]) has today fallen on his sword, which strikes me as a good thing. It's his job to ensure things like this don't happen, so he had to go.
A new CFO has been found, being Mark Hazlewood, formerly Group FD at May Gurney before its acquisition by…
