Selftrade mismanage Freedom4 tender

To Update People on the Pipex/Freedom 4 situation, Halifax did their bit and tendered 85% of my shares, Selftrade on the other hand, mismanaged it and only did 58%, despite me knowing a huge number of their nominee shareholders didn't put their tenders in in time.

I complained about the fact they only tendered 58% when I specifically said tender ALL or as much as possible. The official written reply is :-

"Unfortunately we do not have direct access to the Halifax to substantiate your claim that they tendered 85%..."

Not impressed.

Freedom 4 Tender Offer Messed Up?

The last ailing moments of probably my most disastrous investment ever, Pipex Communications, aka Freedom4 Communications, has not yet ended.

Recently, the company announced a "return of cash to shareholders" by way of special tender for up to 58% of your holding. Sounds simple enough, although really it was a special dividend, since the value of the remaining shares, holding only the Freedom4 joint Wimax venture with Intel and a 3.6 spectrum licence, has been disregarded by the stock market as worthless.

Anyhow, I'm with Halifax and Selftrade on this one, and Halifax got the notification out at least a week earlier than Selftrade. First issue is that many of Selftrade nominee holders are angry at this short deadline of only 2 days to get their reply in, which meant they missed it and have hence seen an 80% drop in the value of their investment!

I'm not impressed either, even though I did get my instructions in, since in my reply I deliberately stated that I wanted to tender ALL, in the event of other holders not taking up the option, yet they have only taken 58% of my holding offline. Ironically, if I had managed to tender the lot at 10p, it'd have been a decent profit, despite the rubbish performance of this one.I used to be impressed with Selftrade, but their offering is falling way behind iweb, especially for ISAs.

Secondly, we come to the Halifax, where my instructions were in well before the date. As of today, mine and many others have seen their entire holdings reappear in their Halifax account, with a huge red mark indicating the whopping 80% loss.

I don't know if this is just an administrative mistake, but I hate to think they "forgot" to tender my instructions.....I await to see if my money appears. These administrative errors could prove to be expensive.......

Pipex communications falls by the Wayside

So it's goodbye soon to one of my worst ever investments, Pipex Communications. I'm not usually dragged into hot stocks, but working in Telecoms, I am convinced that Wimax has a big future and when I heard Pipex owned one of the UK Wimax spectrum licences I got a bit overexcited. Not only that, but every seemed rosy since they also had a more respectable hosting side, a blocking vote on the UK Nominet domain name register and a huge business selling domain names, even if you didn't use their hosting.

Sad to say, fast forward two years and the shares are 33% below my purchase price of 9p. The broadband arm has been sold off, and the chairman, Peter Dubens is selling the hosting arm to....ermmm himself, now he's teamed up with Oakley Capital. Interesting! Wonder how much that business will be resold for in a few years time?

Anyhow, us small shareholders have the poor promise of 10-11p for 58% of our shares in a tender offer, with the balance carried forward to loss making Freedom Communications, who remain holding the licence.

My tip is that you remain a holder. People with their shareholdings in nominee accounts may do a lot better than 58% on the tender offer. Reason being that if other shareholders with the same broker do not take up their share, then your share will be pro-rated up.

This approach has allowed me to exit 100% of a company (especially investment trusts), when the tender was for less. I'm not going so far as to say you will get to tender 100%, but you may fancy a small punt to average up.