News blog

Directex Realisations

  • BY: Andrew Hore |
  • POSTED: 10/02/2010 |

Former chief executive Lionel Thain has requisitioned a general meeting at Directex Realisations.

Rock Nominees, which holds Thain’s 11.4% stake in the company, wants to remove chairman Nicholas Ward and appoint Jonathan Lander and Nicholas Lander to the board. Jonathan Lander owns just short of 10% of Directex. Aim-quoted Volvere, where both Landers’ are executive directors, owns 50% of Interactive Prospect Targeting Ltd - the company that acquired the UK email marketing operations of Directex. Thain is a director and shareholder of this unquoted company.

Directex is the shell company formed after the disposal of the email marketing businesses that made up Interactive Prospect Targeting, where Thain used to be chief executive.

Directex will also try to get shareholders to agree to the cancelation of the company’s Aim quotation and re-registration as a private limited company. The resolution to cancel the quotation was not passed at the AGM on 15 January. Shareholders owning 14.85m shares voted against the resolution – equivalent to 56.7% of the shares voted. IPH needed 75% of the shares voted to be in favour of the cancelation. There was a smaller majority against the reappointment of Martin Kiersnowski and David Cicurel as directors.

The directors have the backing of 23.9% - including 18.9% owned by Fortelus Capital - of the shares but it will be difficult to obtain 75% of the votes in order to cancel the quotation.

The board says that the Aim cancelation is crucial to returning surplus cash to shareholders. It suggests that 1.5p a share could be paid out this year. Up to 4.6p a share could be distributed at a later date.

Jonathan Lander has apparently accused the board of overspending.

Directex says that Thain and Lander have not outlined what they want to do with Directex. There is a temptation to think that they may want to reverse the IPT business into Directex but there could be a number of other uses for a shell.

At 1.625p a share, down 0.5p on the day, Directex is valued at £820,000.

The meeting will be held on 4 March.

Meanwhile, Volvere is holding a general meeting on 22 February to gain shareholder approval to buy back up to 50% of its shares. It is hoped that this might help to boost the share price.

At 295p a share, Volvere is valued at £16.8m. The share price has risen by nearly one-fifth over the past month.

© 2024 Aim Micro. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Browse by issue
All issues
Popular tags
All tags

betbrokers, financial, gold, health, leisure, media, mobile, resources, services, technology

AIM Micro feeds

Keep up to date with articles published at AIMMicro.com. Subscribe to AIM Micro RSS Feeds