TJ, it seems that Tarken-san and I bought all the Livedoor shares that day [on the USA market]. It is obviously not strongly followed in the USA.
Our broker had trouble finding a market maker to do the deal.
It's my first entry into the Japanese market so it's a novel experience. I would prefer to be able to read Japanese, but having a translator and trusted business advisor is near enough, especially since he spent a year working a few metres away from Horie and has a reasonable understanding of what Livedoor, Horie and Japan are about.
Maybe I should deplete more of my USD while the getting is good, though I'm loathe to go to wallop amounts for something I know so little about. In reality, I know little about everything; even if I know 100 times as much about QCOM, it's still little and perhaps not the bits and bytes of knowledge I need. My experience has been that knowing little doesn't seem to make me do any worse than knowing a lot. Mostly, if I'm in tune with the surging mobs [meaning, out of synch], I do just fine.
I prefer to kid myself with loads of due diligence that I have got it all figured out.
From what I can gather, the charges [which haven't yet been laid and they'll have to hurry as they have to let Horie out soon if they don't come up with something, even if it's just a parking ticket], are at worst technicalities and at best absurdities.
For example, apparently he split Livedoor stock to boost the share price. Omigosh! Not only that, but he bought a company planning to use its profits to make Livedoor's profits look better. Oh no!!! It's almost like USA companies which try to make money for shareholders not managers. How awful. And apparently they didn't take out advertisements that they partly owned some company that another company they partly owned was taking over, and sold a company for a profit, or part of it. Or something. It didn't seem too dire to me.
His main crime seems to have been annoying the people who think they are running Japan Inc. A bit like Ron Brierley in New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s rampaged across the corporate landscape, buying, firing, refinancing, leveraging, buying, firing, restructuring and generally disrupting the comfortable old boys club of mutual back scratching and shareholder burgling. Or, like Kirk Kerkorian, T Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn and other corporate raiders, who really annoy establishment people.
I used to worry about assassination by bomb in Tarken-san's workspace by some angry desperado who was offended by Horie. A bit like the bomb in Hitler's bunker missed Adolf as somebody moved the briefcase to the other side of a table support, but killed others. A bomb killed Ernie Abbot <... on 27 March 1984, I was living in Wellington, and was on my way down the Petone motorway to go to a meeting of the Wellington Trades Council, where I was a delegate from the railway workers union. On my car radio I heard about a bombing at the Wellington Trades Hall. One of the people I expected to see at that meeting was the caretaker of the hall, Ernie Abbott, whom I knew well and talked to a lot. When I arrived at the meeting, I heard that he had been blown up by a terrorist bomb.> vdig.net Another was the frog-man and frog-woman French government's terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior, which killed a photographer.
People do kill other people in jealous, envious, greedy, vengeful and angry fits.
I expect Horie will be free again soon enough to get back to having a LOT of fun. The authorities will be over-stepping sensible bounds in an effort to do him in, legally, rather than via criminal attack; though authorities often conduct criminal acts in an attempt to attack people they dislike. Lying in court cases is common. Planting of evidence popular. King George II didn't plant WMDs in Iraq, perhaps because it was too difficult to make it look legitimate. Anyway, he'd planted enough "intelligence" to justify the war in the first place so more would have been overkill, if that's not an insensitive expression.
Anyway, I have depleted my USD a little with a tranche of Livedoor at 85c. I am hoping my tranche will turn to a wallop, with no further input. Horie wants to have the world's biggest market capitalisation. He's still young enough to do it, aged 33. Ambition is a good place to start. Combine that with energy, talent, charm, and a tranche, or wallop, of luck and a lot is doable.
Mqurice |
