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Re: FMS
Maybe it's nothing, but I would be wary of the unusual lack of detail in this announcement.
For example it does not state the identity of the buyer. And note the qualifier: "This agreement was completed in the absence of a feasibility study (currently under way) and there is no certainty the above objectives will be met."
This "agreement" may be no more than a non-binding letter of intent.
Re: LTON
There may be an opportunity, but the last trade in Australia was 2 months ago (and only 100 shares) according to the infallible Yahoo Finance
Re: ASIA
Wow, only 53% in favor. They just barely made it.
Re: WATG
Looks like the class action suit was settled earlier this year for $3mm, but I can't find any info on the expected proceeds from liquidation of the company. It could be an interesting precedent for other companies that have gone dark.
RE: PME
Chinese companies see land as a risk-free investment. Companies are always scheming to get discounted land from local governments and if it's available to them then they will always take it.
Chiscam CEO arrested for rape.
Anybody remember XING/QXM?
Apparently you can screw shareholders, but you can't screw a golf coach. Link
Re: ALN
10Q and DEF14A make no reference at all to buyout offer or to any related lawsuits. Every other company with an offer under active review at least says they can't say anything about it.
Signed SarbOx certification says:
The information contained in the Report fairly presents, in all material respects, the financial condition and results of operations of the Company.
Bronte Capital slams Geoninvesting Link
"I have seldom seen a better candidate for a short squeeze. There is a large short position in the stock."
Re: TRIT
They didn't put out any press release about yesterday's 8k bomb.
How are they going to file YE financials if they may have lost control over one of their VIEs?
TRIT - he's also trying to steal one of the VIEs
TRIT It's bad
ITEM 8.01 OTHER EVENTS.
On December 11, 2013, the Board of Directors (“Board”) of Tri-Tech Holding Inc. (the “Registrant”), with immediate effect, suspended the authority of Guang (Gavin) Cheng to act on behalf of the Registrant in his capacity as a member of the Registrant’s Board and authorized the Registrant’s appropriate officers to remove Mr. Cheng from any and all positions in the Registrant’s subsidiaries and affiliates. The Board further advises its shareholders that it will recommend the early replacement of Mr. Cheng from its Board at the upcoming annual shareholder meeting. The reasons for these actions, and the Registrant’s proactive steps to safeguard the Registrant and its shareholders from adverse actions by Mr. Cheng are described in greater detail in this current report and relate to (1) the Board’s determination of a breach by Mr. Cheng of the Registrant’s policies and procedures regarding wire transfers and (2) Mr. Cheng’s unauthorized withholding of the corporate chop of the Registrant’s affiliate, Beijing Satellite Science & Technology Co. (“BSST”) upon Mr. Cheng’s termination by the Registrant as its Chief Executive Officer.
BITA Secondary at $30 Link
Stock was under $4 last summer.
Market cap now over $1Bn and P/E over 40.
Bertelsmann was the selling shareholder.
Market seems to apply different standards to online vs offline Chinese businesses.
Re: CCCL
Yeah, Smells like a SA article hyping the director resignation. Volume is too low to be a hit from a source with real credibility.
Re: CCCL
Paul Kelly is old, like 72. He's been Chairman since this was founded as a China oriented SPAC. Not too surprising that he's ready to move on after 5+ years. I think Davis was involved because she was Kelly's friend/acquaintance. The audit committee head (Stuginski) is still around. If he had quit then it would be a bit more alarming.
It will be important to see who replaces Kelly and Davis.
Re: ZOOM
I couldn't get any buyers at $3 for my little spec position earlier this week. I thought the company might have a nice net cash position after the closing of the sale of its China ops. But there's been a quite a parade of blunders so the stock was justifiably weak. Then it triples on this letter of intent? I lucked out and sold ASAP.
Re: ZX
Certainly unexpected. I was very happy with the wheel business and the details of the last quarterly report were outstanding. I thought the existing business would be worth 5x the current share price in 5 years.
On the other hand, Chinese online businesses seem to be the only ones that get a decent valuation in the US market. It's possible that the new business could be worth 5x the $300mm transaction valuation in one year. Or not. There's very little to go on at this point.
Re: TRIT
Good news earlier this year when they were able to partner with a state-owned company to expand India business Link
The partnership appeared to validate TRIT as a legitimate operator and provide access to working capital required for developing the business.
Bad news that this partnership was recently dissolved. Link
Re: ALN
No reference to buyout. Looks to me like there is no buyout.
No explanation for expenditure of $9.5mm on land use rights in the quarter.
Sales may have been impacted by safety scandals. Example
WH Files 20F link
Merger is still active:
------------------------------------------------------------------
On August 15, 2013, upon the approval of the special committee, we entered into an amendment to the Merger Agreement with Parent and Merger Sub to extend the termination date of the Merger Agreement to December 31, 2013.
The merger, which is currently expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2013, is subject to the authorization and approval of the Merger Agreement by an affirmative vote of shareholders representing at least two-thirds of the ordinary shares present and voting in person or by proxy as a single class at a meeting of our shareholders, as well as certain other customary closing conditions. EMH and UMW collectively beneficially own sufficient ordinary shares to approve the Merger Agreement and the merger and have agreed to vote in favor of such approval. If completed, the merger will result in our becoming a privately-held company and our ADSs no longer being listed on the New York Stock Exchange. However, we cannot assure you that the merger will be completed.
For additional information regarding the going private transaction, please refer to our Schedule 13E-3/A and preliminary proxy statement and a Form 6-K filed with the SEC on June 27, 2013 and August 15, 2013.
The terms of credit and other banking facilities provided to WSP Pipe by Bangkok Bank Public Company Limited, or Bangkok Bank, require us to remain a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. We are currently in discussions with Bangkok Bank regarding obtaining a waiver for this requirement.
LTON downgrades auditor Link
SEC busts Sherb&Co for bad China audits Link
Re: KEYP
IB told me they wont allow trades because the stock only has two market makers. That may explain the extreme illiquidity and limited access to quote data.
ISS offer revised to $5.45. Binding until 11/30. No financing contingency.
Re: UTSI
I don't think Shah ever wanted to buy the company. He was just trying to trigger some sort of corporate action that would boost the share price. As a board member he will still be in a position to advocate for that.
NQ: Carson Block interview on bloomberg
Below is the full transcript of the Bloomberg TV interview:
Block on whether NQ's CEO recent comments to Bloomberg News is a lot of 'Hocus-Pocus' still:
"This is just them playing the shell game and are very poorly trying to recover from the lies that they have previously told. That CEO…we caught the company just last week in some massive lies about her involvement with NQ. She has been far more involved with NQ than the company had been willing to admit. In sort, their largest customer is a shell. It is controlled by NQ. It is an undisclosed, related party and it does not exist"
On thoughts on why the market is rebounding:
"We have seen this every time. We go out, we call CCME a massive fraud – this is really a redux of CCME’s… then the companies and its proxies are able to pump it back up and when they’re gone. This is familiar to us. We really have seen this movie before. We have no doubt that in a year from now, this company will have been delisted and the people on the U.S. side who are right now standing I am talking about the U.S. Management – we think a year from now that will have lawyers and they will be saying, ‘How could we have known? We really weren’t involved.’ This process takes a little while. We are happy so far."
On where they had accounting deceptiveness:
"Over 90% of the revenue does not exist. We can start with the revenue line being massively inflated. As is profit. The company has made a number of acquisitions. It usually pays with them in stocks. But what we can cane, some of these companies are empty boxes and they’re paying tens of millions of dollars of shares for them, which we believe, is basically a way to put more money in the Fraudster’s pocket. I think there is confusion between when we are saying something is a business fraud and when we are saying something is an accounting fraud. An accounting fraud you are gilding the lily, you are boosting profit, maybe you are inflating revenue some. When you are a business fraud, like this one, the vast majority of what you claim exists; in fact it does not exist."
On whether 90% of their revenue is fake:
"Yeah, our estimate is that over 90% is fake. It is hard to tell with precision. We know that the number one purported source of revenue does not exist. We published a piece this Tuesday called NQ’s Top 10 lies since Friday which would have only been four days earlier."
"I would like to highlight two lies. Number one the lies about the CEO’s involvement with NQ and the timing that she left. We caught them red-handed and they had to fess up on their call but they did not explain why they had lied. And number two they finally revealed the identities of their second and third largest purported customers. However, as we show, that was just a poorly conceived lie because based on their disclosures, the names that it gave those numbers two and three could not actually be those customers. It was yet another lie about the revenue. Number one does not exist. It numbers two and three do not exist in the way near that the company says they do."
On whether he should really understand what is going on, on the ground in China:
"It is a strange claim that we have not been there. I have a team. And our team has visited – as we wrote the report, we went to 10 possible addresses for Yidatong. Half of them did not even exist. The company says we use service offices. Let me emphasize, half of the addresses do not physically exist. There is no office building at the address that they gave. That is not normal behavior in China. So we went to 10 addresses and we have also been to their purported address that they disclosed to investors on the conference call. The truth is there is not even on Yidatong sign in the lobby or on the Marquee for that company. The sign that exists is for a company called ‘Nineh.’ That is the business that operates there. Yidatong is figment of the imagination. No one had heard of the company. It is not on the door."
On whether anyone on his team attempted to speak with executives at NQ:
"Yes, and we did. We got answers to some questions. Some answers don’t make sense. For example, we asked repeatedly for a breakdown of where they sell internationally. They were always cagey about that. We asked for a list of sellers of their prepaid cards. They now come out and say they have 5,000 sellers of these pre-paid cards. They release a list of the handful. All the Beijing sellers are in the exact same shopping mall. We asked for these items before and they refuse to give them. That’s because these parties don’t exist"
On whether someone could go to jail over this:
"Yeah. Unfortunately, with all of these China frauds that we have seen, the fraudsters don’t get punished. The Chinese don’t punish them. That is something investors need to understand. To pull this off, you need collision from people. Sometimes you need help from somebody from a bank that gets bribed"
On whether there are crooked bankers involved:
"They usually are able to co-opt people at the bank. People are at the bank are making if they are really good, maybe $1,500 a month. You are running a fraud or you can make nine figures, you peel off some money and a consequence-free environment. And that is the key. Again, nobody in China ever gets in trouble for defrauding U.S. investors.... They actually in some cases get rewarded for defrauding U.S. investors. This is something people have to keep in mind."
Re: AMCN
I guess the risk created by this HNA news is that a substantial amount of AMCN cash will be committed to this start-up (minimum 400mm RMB and up to 1000mm RMB if other partners aren't found). That could be more than all of the company's cash.
FENG down 20%
Only thing I can think of is that it was another favorite investment of Toro Investment Partners who could be under heavy pressure from losses on NQ.
ALN short interest jumped from 1000 shares to almost 48000 shares
Settlement Date Short Interest Avg Daily Share Volume Days To Cover
10/15/2013 47,817 108,442 1.000000
9/30/2013 1,293 53,551 1.000000
9/13/2013 2,030 32,597 1.000000
8/30/2013 3,233 39,237 1.000000
8/15/2013 11,064 90,518 1.000000
7/31/2013 13,729 48,532 1.000000
7/15/2013 1,079 146,126 1.000000
RE: AMCN
If I recall correctly, the Elec-Tech investment was in the form of screens rather than cash.
The weakness that I see in this business model is that the company doesn't own the real estate. When contracts expire AMCN can shed the low margin sites, but it will face demands for more rent at the high margin sites. How will the business ever earn more than just marginal profits?
20F excerpt:
We may also be unable to retain or renew concession rights contracts when they expire. Most of our concession rights contracts to operate advertising media in airports and on airplanes typically have terms ranging from one to five years, with no automatic renewal provisions. As of December 31, 2012, we had in total approximately 36 concession rights contracts to be renewed in the next twelve months, with aggregated concession fees of approximately $80.9 million. We cannot assure you that we will be able to renew any or all of these contracts when they expire, and the terms of any renewal may not be commercially advantageous to us. The concession fees that we incur under our concession rights contracts comprise a significant portion of our cost of revenues, but airports and airlines tend to increase concession fees overtime, so as some of our concession rights contracts terminate, we may experience a significant increase in our costs of revenues when we renew these contracts. If we cannot pass increased concession costs onto our advertisers through rate increases, our earnings and our results of operations could be materially and adversely affected. In addition, many of our concession rights contracts to operate in airports and on airplanes contain provisions granting us certain exclusive concession rights. We cannot assure you that we will be able to retain these exclusivity provisions when we renew these contracts. If we were to lose exclusivity, our advertisers may decide to advertise with our competitors or otherwise reduce their spending on our network and we may lose market share.
Certain concession rights contracts allow the airports to terminate the contracts unilaterally without any compensation in certain circumstances. We cannot assure you that our concession rights contracts will not be terminated, whether with or without justification. In addition, most of our concession rights contracts were entered into with the advertising companies operated by or advertising agencies hired by airports or airline companies, and not with the airports or airline companies directly. Although these advertising companies and agents have generally assured us in writing that they have the rights to operate advertising media in airports or on airplanes and all of them have performed their contractual obligations, we cannot assure you that airports or airline companies will not challenge or revoke the contractual concession rights granted to us by their advertising companies or agents; if such challenges or revocations occur, our revenues and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.
NQ: Legit according to Toro IP
Today was one of the best buying opportunities we've seen in the stock market in a long time.
Regarding the MW report, there are three types of allegations:
1. Those that are quantifiably verifiable through facts
2. Those that are qualitative in nature and therefore not quantifiably verifiable
3. Those that are immaterial to the business even if true
An example of type 1 is the cash the company allegedly does not have. Having verified the cash balances ourselves, we are highly confident that the foundation of MW's research is wrong. Otherwise, the cash could not be there, but it is. We expect the company to refute these type 1 allegations immediately tomorrow and put them to bed.
An example of type 2 is the notion that NQ's code is unsafe, that it leads to security leaks. This is an opinion, like calling Microsoft Windows an unsafe operating system or Android as an OS an unsafe OS. No matter what the company does to refute these allegations, I'm sure MW will issue an opinion that they disagree. However, there are numerous ways in which to use facts to establish credibility among truly unbiased people, and we will share our views on these types of allegations when we have an opportunity to write them up.
An example of type 3 is what the attach rate at some Target stores was on the day of their visit. Frankly, even if that were all true, it is such a small portion of their business that, in the grand scheme of things, who cares? However, we fundamentally disagree with those type 3 observations because we have done work that indicates otherwise.
Largely, this was a hit job issued to scare people like the various folks on this comment thread into selling to profit from a short-term move in the price. Here is the track record of companies that Muddy Waters cautioned against since Sino-Forest, their only notable call:
6/28/2011: Open letter to SPRD. Went from $12.95 to $8.59 that day. SPRD is now at $30.44 as it waits to be acquired by the investment fund of one of China's top universities.
11/21/2011: Publishes FMCN hit job. Went from $25.50 to $8.79 that day. FMCN was acquired by leading global PE firm Carlyle for $27.42.
7/18/2012: Publishes EDU hit job. Went from $14.62 to $9.41. EDU is now $28.08 and climbing quickly.
11/26/2012: Publishes hit job on Olam International Limited. Went from SGD1.66 to SGD$1.395. Currently it is SGD1.565. This is the only one that is lower, though not by much, since MW initiated.
5/10/2013: Tweets that VIPS may be fraudulent. Went from $32.70 to $31.26. Today, closed at $73.30
7/7/2013: Publishes hit job on AMT. Went from $74.71 to $68.36. Today, $80.38.
We strongly believe NQ is going to $45 and this is an outstanding gift from Muddy Waters to NQ shareholders.
NQ Fraud according to Muddy Waters Report Link
CADC: Favorable mention in New York Times
Efforts to keep that growing mass of debris under control through recycling are just getting started. China Advanced Construction Materials Group, a NASDAQ-listed company, has set up plants in the large interior cities of Guiyang and Lanzhou to grind up construction waste to reuse in concrete.
“This one thing seems small, but it’s very important,” said Wu Changhua, the greater China director for The Climate Group, an international environmental NGO that helped the company develop the recycling program. “Working with the company and the experts, we pretty much concluded that in the construction sector there should be no waste at all. That was very encouraging for us. And if that’s the case, we have to ask what are the barriers.”
Re: BORN
Float is about 11mm shares. Volume so far today is about 11mm shares.
Re: LLEN
No stock available to short. I had some bought in at the open.
CCCL Article: Link
Re: MGH
MISVF trades as MSV.TO in Canada.
KGJI is a jeweler with some inventory exposure to PM price moves. Look scammy so "investors" beware.
GMNFF (GMN.V) is a clean story and great value, but the CEO has vacuumed up all the liquidity (both personal investment and company share repurchase). Pays a dividend every year too.
Re: MGH
MGH has $1.5mm of debt (borrowed from MISVF)
I think MISVF is the better way to play MISVF. MGH has low liquidity and doesn't trade at a meaningful discount.
Re: MGH
The value is in MISVF
Re: GAGA
Be wary of scammy connections
http://seekingalpha.com/article/298783-alleged-fraud-at-chaoda-is-closely-connected-le-gaga-rotten-too