THANK YOU. I no longer feel as though I'm on an island.
The New Zealand PR was pretty snakey to me. Slimeballish. Could have been entirely made up. I will admit I missed it at first and was happy. Thanks to JFM for calling it out.
Once again, if they had anything significant on the horizon then they wouldn't have needed to screw us with dilution and eventually a downtrend in stock price, although yeah it's not certain that will happen.
Management would have to be incredibly stupid to do the deal with the same private partner as before. Say what you will about their ability to deliver on time, but I doubt they would do that to themselves again. I think it's far more likely that it's a completely new partner.
That being said, what's to stop this new partner from doing the same thing?
I don't buy into the idea that these deals are always a bad thing or that the buyers always screw the stock; a single shareholder is just as likely to sell on a small rise; the difference is that generally these deals result in so many shares being given to one group or person that regular market volume doesn't balance it out when they sell off.