Good morning!

There is no shortage of company announcements today, so I'm going through them personally at the moment. As usual, I'm happy to take requests in terms of which ones to cover here.

My final list is as follows:

Also, Paul updated yesterday's report with more sections. You can read that here.

Cheers,

Graham



Conviviality (LON:CVR) (suspended)


Update on progress and potential equity fundraise - Conviviality, the alcohol wholesaler and retailer produced an update at 6pm last night.

In short, it looks like a horror show for existing shareholders. The only ray of hope is that we still don't know at what price the new money will be raised, so there is still a chance that the forthcoming dilution will not be too severe. But it is now inevitable that those who take part in the forthcoming fundraise will end up owning the majority of the company.

If you remember the recent timeline, Conviviality discovered a £30 million tax payment coming due shortly and that it hadn't made provision for. This came after an error had led to the company miscalculating its profit forecasts, and trading margins had weakened. The shares were suspended and the CEO stood down, though staying on to help with the transition.

Originally, I thought that the company might only need to raise £30 million, plus a little bit more for extra comfort. After all, there was no clue up until recently that it had any short-term funding requirement. The balance sheet wasn't pretty and its lending facilities were maxed out, but it was thought to be profitable.

It turns out that the company needs to raise far more than £30 million. It is looking for £125 million, for the following purposes:

·      "Resolve overdue payments with its creditors and return them to normalised trading terms;

·      Settle payments with HMRC;

·      Repay the Company's £30.0 million revolving credit facility in its entirety; and

·      Provide working capital headroom and fund costs…

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