After much thinking and watching all the speculation and negative talk I decided to speak out and tell the real facts as I know them being previously involved with this company and so in full disclosure, I was a former director (under AQLV) and current shareholder of Verity. I have a working relationship with the former CEO and actual knowledge of events that have taken place.
First off, the previous CEO has nothing bad to say about Verity Corp or their management. He has never spoken negatively about them and has always been available to them for calls to him regarding historical information. Given the negative comments that continue to come at him, I am surprised that he continues to take the high road, but I think that says a lot about his integrity.
Let me take you back 3.5 years to when he took over what was then known as Infrared Systems International (IFRS). That company had been run by another CEO. Interestingly, he said that previous CEO got beat up on the iHub boards and was accused of selling stock, etc. but said that was never the case. He said that former CEO of IFRS was professional and worked with the new company when at all possible to help the company and the shareholders.
He then took a soon to be zero asset company (based on the agreement that the IFRS sub was to be spun out - this is all in the filings) and began laying the ground work for acquisitions and growth. This brought him to an introduction to AquaLiv, a biotech company run by another party. His opinion is that the Aqualiv technology is amazing (and I concur having used the products myself) and that the Aqualiv President is one of the best people he has met or done business with (again I agree with him).
He freely admits that the downfall was the inability to secure adequate financing. The company had a large funding commitment a few years ago that was backed up by a larger farming group and a conglomerate of other businesses. However, in the end he believes the deal had too many moving parts to be completed. Because of this he started looking for an acquisition with assets and revenue that would be aligned with the vision of Aqualiv. His opinion was that Aqualiv did not have enough assets to secure the financing in the market.
This lead him to an introduction to Verity. He was impressed enough with Verity's business model and management team that he believed a merger would be in the best interest of the shareholders (I concurred). I was also evident that Verity recognized the value in the Aqualiv technology and wanted to ensure that was part of the deal moving forward. After evaluating all things, the conclusion was this was a good step in the evolution of the company and that it was necessary to help secure current shareholders. As part of that transaction I resigned from the board to make room for others and so that I could focus on new endeavors. The prior CEO was to remain on and take the new company through the merger and filing processes, which he did without flaw. I can attest to the number of unpaid hours he spent working around the clock working with the company and vendors to get things completed on time and properly.
I went back and traced the stock price from when he took over until today. I found that after accounting for the forward split that he performed 3.5 years ago and then the large reverse split that Verity performed post-merger, that the stock price is relatively the same today as it was 3.5 years ago. The big difference seems to be that now the company has $5m in assets and $2.5m in revenue. The only problem I see is that the current company runs in a negative and does not seem to be communicating anything to the market compared to previous. Other than that, it seems like all of the positive moves for the public company came from the previous CEO.
I think the current company needs to spend more time working on the current business and showing investors what they have done lately, rather than compare to what the past looks like. From what I can see, if it was not for the moves made by the previous CEO, there would not be a company to be talked about in the first place.
If you have any questions about this post feel free to private message me and I would be happy to answer any question you may have.
