DailyMail: Chairman of MUI in divorce battle

The UK tabloid DailyMail reported the following:

Former Miss Malaysia could get £500m payout in Britain's biggest ever divorce settlement from multimillionaire husband

Pauline Chai, now 66, is divorcing Malaysian businessman Khoo Kay Peng Chairman of Malaysian United Industries has properties around the world The 74-year-old also owns a 40 per cent stake in Laura Ashley Divorce petition filed last month on grounds of 'unreasonable behaviour'

The 74-year-old also has a 40 per cent stake in Laura Ashley, which now has sales of £286 million a year, and is director of Corus Hotels Limited which owns ten hotels including the grand Corus Hyde Park Hotel.

Some more information at the website of The Times.

Certain assets are held by listed Malaysian companies (not by Khoo personally) in the MUI and Pan Malaysia stable (PMI and PMCorp), those companies also have liabilities and are owned by other shareholders.

One should therefore not count the value of the assets but of the shares of these companies, and the share prices of all these companies are languishing, they are all penny stocks.

There have been serious Corporate Governance concerns in all of them, as mentioned in this blog and much more in WhereIsZeMoola.

I therefore get the impression that the above amounts are widely overstated (at least as far as they relate to the assets in listed companies). Khoo Kay Peng is also not listed in the Top 13 of the richest Malaysians.

PMI: problem solved

PMI had to find an independent director, only one was not enough according to the rules. More can be found here about the issues involved:

http://cgmalaysia.blogspot.com/search/label/PMI

PMI might have had some problems finding one, because they were more than one month late finding one.

So what did PMI do? They just converted an non-independent director to an independent director, problem solved.

http://announcements.bursamalaysia.com/EDMS/edmsweb.nsf/LsvAllByID/86B90A2BCA5DD445482579220039F96A?OpenDocument

No explanation whatsoever: why was this director first non-independent, what changed that now she can be assigned to be independent?

I find that rather peculiar, to say the least. And it is not the first time for PMI:

http://www.mswg.org.my/project/mswg/media/2009/01/21/090954-916.PDF
The new independent director of PMI, Puan Farizon bt Dato’ Ibrahim, is a Director of Metrojaya, which is under MUI (who has a common majority shareholder with PMI), but once Metrojaya belonged to PMI. It was privatized in a rather poor way, the money offered per share was less than the cash per share. Later Metrojaya was sold by PMI to MUI. More about these controversial deals can be found with Ze Moola:

http://whereiszemoola.blogspot.com/search/label/Metro%20Jaya

No news further about the MGO of PMI. The announcement was made on August 26, 2011, they would follow up withing three weeks. That has long passed, does that mean the authorities are looking into the issues surrounding this MGO?

Somehow or the other I don't think that PMI is really trying to win the 2011 Corporate Governance award. Is it time for the authorities to interfere? Are the Minority Shareholders of PMI treated in a proper way?

PMI: a sad story for Minority Shareholders

The Star: http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/8/27/business/9383051&sec=business

"Pan Malaysian Industries Bhd (PMI) yesterday told Bursa Malaysia that it had received an unconditional takeover offer from a consortium of three companies at a cash offer price of 4.5 sen for each offer share."

"If PMI could not comply with the shareholding spread requirement as a result of acceptances received under the takeover offer, the consortium said they would delist PMI."



The "infamous" GO (General Offer) with "delisting threat" against which Minority Investors hardly have any chance to fight unless they don't mind ending up with shares in an unlisted company (and even then their shares could be Mandatory Acquired). The price is only 4.5 sen, that sounds like a bloody shame, the share traded routinely higher than that, even in 2011:

This is one company that has been a nightmare for its Minority Investors:

In the past 10 years several right issues which equal to negative dividend payments (from the investors to the company, if people don't subscribe they get further diluted at a low price). It booked routinely losses but due to the tight control through its Majority Shareholder it could not change its management, hoping for a new team to restructure the company.

This company has been involved with the delisting of Metrojaya, another really bad case of Corporate Governance, as was pointed out by Ze Moola: http://whereiszemoola.blogspot.com/2006/11/muis-purchase-of-metrojaya_02.html

A sad state of affairs and as usual it is the Minority Shareholders who take the brunt.