As I mentioned before, I didn't know what to expect of the meeting. I thought there was a reasonably good chance we would not be given an opportunity to ask questions. So I prepared a flyer to pass out to as many shareholders as I could to let them know about some of the questions swirling around the company and to tell them the importance of getting our questions answered BEFORE the vote to elect new directors. There were two or three shareholders besides myself who tried to get our questions asked at the beginning of the meeting, but Rhodes wouldn't take them then. He did say that he would take questions after the vote but that due to limited time, he would only allow each shareholder to speak for only two minutes.
I know that I haven't used the words "brilliant" and "Rhodes" in the same sentence too often recently, but I have to admit-- this was a brilliant tactic by Rhodes to control the meeting. It prevented those of us who wanted to demand answers to our questions before the vote from interrupting the vote by continuing to ask questions. Quite truthfully, if they had not stated that they would accept questions later, I was prepared to continue to ask questions during the vote count and I would not have stopped unless they physically threw me out. The format in which they allowed questions was brilliant. Because I had only two minutes I had to spew out about 4 or 5 questions very quickly. Rhodes then only answered one or two of those questions before moving on. And I may be dense, but I really didn't understand his answer too well. I asked him, amongst other things, about the status of the Ah-Immunoassay and why they had given away the rights to it. Rhodes said, to the best of my understanding, that DOW had only limited rights and that they were in negotiations with DOW to get back those rights. I was really confused by this. Maybe Jonathan or someone else who was there can fill in what I missed. I mean, if they have to negotiate with DOW before they can lease the assay to someone else, haven't they in effect given up the right for all practical purposes to the assay. My apologies to all for not being bright enough to really understand the response.
Other questions that I asked got no answer, or no satisfactory answer at all. I asked why they didn't notify us of Campbell's resignation, or Ip leaving the company, or about Campbell's lawsuit against the company. I think Rhodes said that their notifications met all SEC requirements and there was something about Campbell's lawsuit in the last quarterly statement. The forum was not conducive to asking follow up questions. The meeting started at 11:00 and it lasted only 1 hour before Rhodes said that we had to leave the room because the hotel needed it for another convention. How convenient, it just happens to work out that they only had the room for about an hour. This was an excuse to limit questions. I would have preffered to ask one question at a time, get an answer to that question, and be able to ask a followup question based on that answer. That is the best way to get real information. Maybe the format that they chose just happened by chance to be one in which it was hard to get real answers. When you give someone only 2 minutes to make a statement and ask questions, you greatly limit what they can say. And you give yourself a chance to selectively answer the questions that you want to answer with partial truths. But perhaps giving the shareholder a chance to really understand what was going on wasn't Rhodes' primary agenda.
By the way, I wrote the address of this Silicon Investor forum on the sheet I handed out. Let me give a great big Welcome to any newcomers who might start reading this thread. I hope you find this site informative. I've learned a lot from other investors here. It's a great place to pool our insights. By putting our collective intelligence together we can get a better idea of what's going on than we can just by ourselves. Just one warning: Don't believe everything you read here. Weigh every new piece of information that you find against what you already know and ask yourself if it sounds reasonable. Is any new claim really believable? I think most of the people here are straight shooters, but we really don't know what hidden agendas others may have. So be careful in how you evaluate the information you see here and I think your time here will be worthwhile.
Robin Messing |
