Good morning! It's Paul here - sorry, I forgot to put up a placeholder last night.

It's Budget day today. EDIT: No it's not, apologies, it's on Monday! I misread something.

Let's hope Philip Hammond doesn't try to steal any of our money! There's an interesting article on the BBC's website, entitled "What do young people want the government to spend more on?". Isn't that revealing? The assumption being that government spending should always go up, with total disregard for where the money is actually going to come from!

It doesn't seem to occur to the BBC or young people, that perhaps the government should spend existing resources more efficiently, and borrow less, so that we don't have to spend a fortune on debt interest in future.



Crawshaw (LON:CRAW)

Share price: 1.88p (down 22% today)
No. shares: 113.0m
Market cap: £2.1m

Statement re media speculation

This chain of butchers/fast food, today says;

The Board of Crawshaw Group plc notes the recent media speculation regarding a potential financial restructuring and equity fundraising.

As announced in the Company's interim results on 26 September 2018, the Board have completed their review of the business and is implementing its change programme to restore growth and profitability, which includes reviewing its structure and investment in traditional high street locations.

The Board confirms that it is considering a number of remedial actions to address the key issues it has identified, which may include raising additional funding through an equity capital raising.

No decision has yet been made by the Board on these matters and the Company will update the market in due course.


I'm fuming about this, as it's a good example of how appalling the system here is, at raising money via placings. When a company is doing a fundraising, the shares should be suspended. I understand that is a requirement in some places abroad. Otherwise it's a false market. People are buying the shares in the market, oblivious to the reality that the company is trying to raise fresh equity, at a discount to the prevailing share price. In distressed situations like this, the discount can often be very large. Therefore, private shareholders are lambs to the slaughter, and are buying shares at an artificial price. This is scandalous!

We really should all write to…

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