This is an interesting article that I just came across today. It's dated 12/7/2007. After reading the article, it raises the questions: "How can a public company, Ampex Corporation, supposedly representing its shareholders, not respond to one of its shareholder trying to increase the value of the company's stock price???" Instead, Strickland and McKibben take Ampex to Chapter 11 and the major beneficiary of the Chapter 11 is Hillside Capital, Inc. that Ed Bramson co-founded.
Read for yourselves:
Ampex to biggest investor: we won’t write you anymore
By Jack Davis
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pm in Ampex.
Ampex told its recent pen pal and biggest investor, ValueVest — which has been exchanging testy correspondence with Ampex for months about the best way for the company to exploit its sizable patent portfolio — that it won’t be answering it’s letters anymore, at least not in writing, according to a filing it made Wednesday.
ValueVest has been particularly ticked off lately about tentative plans Ampex has made with Hillside Capital, a company that manages Ampex’s pension fund. Ampex is seeking to restructure payments toward the $45 million it owes Hillside, and one idea includes the issuance of more Ampex stock in exchange.
ValueVest, which owns about 13.4 percent of Ampex’s shares, is not very keen on the idea. In a letter it sent the company Dec. 6 the investment firm said that Ampex could easily pay the $14.2 million of the debt to Hillside that is due over the next two years by enacting a number of ”commercially sensible transactions” that would not require the company to dilute the current shareholders’ stakes in Ampex.
”This arithmetic completely ignores the substantial value that we continue to believe the Company can and should generate through additional licenses and other monetizations of its intellectual property assets,” the ValueVest letter said.
In its reply delivered Dec. 10, Ampex told the firm that ”Your letter purports to present an assessment of Ampex’s financial health based on a combination of inaccuracies and selected publicly-available data. Your conclusions are not accurate.”
The Ampex reply concluded: ”While we welcome input from shareholders and will continue to engage in a dialogue with all of our constituents, we do not intend to respond in writing to further correspondence from ValueVest.”
Now you know why Ed Bramson, as one of the major stockholder of Ampex Corporation, is keeping so quiet on the whole Chapter 11 Bankruptcy matter. See my earlier post on 4imprints that revealed that Ed Bramson was also one of the co-founder of Hillside Capital. |
