Saturday, September 02, 2017

Ron Brierley and IPE


Ron Brierly is a famous New Zealand investor, now based in Australia. He is chairman of MVT. This company is Gabriel Radzyminski and is supposedly a listed investment company, but one that has a habit of taking over other small companies. At Sandon Capital he also has an activist approach to investing.

They had a stake in IPE of less than 5%, but two days ago took their stake up to near 20% when they purchased a large block of shares from Wilson Asset Management. I infer that was who sold from the list of major shareholders in the IPE annual report. I did have 150,000 shares in IPE. Yesterday I bought another 250,000. Either MVT is planning a takeover of IPE, or they think that the remaining private equity assets are worth more than their carrying value. Given that the shares are trading at net asset value of 0.105 cents, they must think the latter either way. On the other hand, though Wilson Asset Management must have not seen additional value. Or perhaps a $2 million shareholding is no longer worth their attention when they are managing $2 billion and could find a willing buyer at NAV. The shares have fallen in value as the company has returned capital and dividends in a winding down strategy.

Anyway, I now own 0.3% of the company, which is a bit scary :)

1 comment:

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

I sold my 244,000 IPE shares a month or so for around 10c. After the last few dividends paid out the cash realized by selling the most liquid investments, the latest annual report suggested that the remaining assets may take a long while to liquidate, so I decided to just get out of this investment.

The price has been bouncing around between 9.5c and 10.5c per share, so if you want to add some more and hope to make a windfall if MVT does a takeover, getting some whenever it dips below 10c may make sense.