Mosgiel to look at ownership

Press, 7 December 1988, Page 43

Mosgiel to look at ownership

p A Dunedin Mosgiel, Ltd directors hope to get in touch with shareholders of the revived company in about 10 days, according to the manager and former receiver, Mr Tony Anderson.

As receiver, Mr Anderson produced about $2O million through the realisation of assets and profits from a finance company, which enabled him last Friday to hand the company back to its directors. The question of bonafide share ownership in a company which was thought to be extinct for eight years now crops up. Mr Anderson said he had a good idea who the shareholders were. These would be the people who would be contacted first, telling them what their holdings were, according to the records. “We kept the register running for several months after the company

went into receivership because we were hoping to arrange a takeover,” he said yesterday. “Only when the chances of this dwindled did we wind the register down. “There could be some disputes over ownership. There were quite a few substantial sales in the last few days of listing on the stock exchange as people perhaps speculated on the future.” Mr Anderson acknowledged that there would be cases where people had thrown the scrip out, or where it had become lost as people had moved or died. There is a standard Stock Exchange procedure in the case of genuine loss. People complete

an indemnity form promising to surrender the old scrip if it turns up and this will be followed in the Mosgiel case. “I am hoping it will not be too horrendous,” Mr Anderson said. There is now only one class of share, he continued. All preference shares converted to ordinaries last year in a normal procedure. Thus people who may have thought they had a prior claim on any funds would be mistaken. This goes for arrears of dividend in addition to capital. In 1984 an Auckland company called Merchant Funds, Ltd, offered 10c a share for the 13 per cent preference shares. It received a few shares,

according to Mr Anderson, but it would not be getting the dividend. “Legal opinion tells us that preference shares would have been paid out of the profits of Mosgiel, Ltd, but it did not make any profits after 1979.” Merchant Funds will receive only the 50c payable to all shareholders —• a 40c profit per share but probably no profit at all considering the way interest rates on the money presumably borrowed to buy the shares would have eaten up the margin. A similar equation has to be worked out by shareholders such as Broadbank Ltd, which bought 400,000 shares for as little as 2c each in the final days before receivership.