Steinhoff: On Tekkie and Hamilton
All,
Please find our unchanged analysis here.
While disputes with Mr. Tekkie and class actions managed by Hamilton are making headlines, we remain confident that the Grand Settlement will be substantially implemented in its current form. However,
Hamilton:
Steinhoff have achieved a mild win in the Amsterdam District Court against Hamilton. Hamilton are attacking the appointment of the Committee of Representation in May, which mostly represents parties in favour of the deal (the vast majority) and have filed complaints in two Dutch courts and in South Africa.
1) The Amsterdam District Court's refusal of Hamilton’s "additional requests” is final and cannot be appealed.
2) The Amsterdam Court of Appeal (appeal to the District Court’s original decision in May to appoint the Committee of Representation) has scheduled its first hearing for Tuesday next week. However, SIHNV’s administrators have already requested the creditors’ meeting on June 30th be postponed. The claim is pending.
3) Hamilton along with Trevo are managing shareholder class actions. Their point is that the Steinhoff board had not performed the necessary solvency tests, neither when it guaranteed the European debt, nor in the 2019 restructuring and that therefore the guarantees (and therefore the CPUs) are void. Regarding the latter allegation, Steinhoff’s defence is that the 2019 restructuring merely constituted a roll-over and did not include new debt and it supplied the relevant SoA docs last week to the Western Cape High Court in South Africa. We don’t know the strategy to defend against the granting of guarantees in the first place.
Tekkie Town:
Mr. Tekkie (a spin-off of the sellers of Tekkie Town to Steinhoff for shares that turned out worthless) are hoping to effect the liquidation of SIHPL. Their claim is that the Grand Settlement provides them with “no meaningful benefits” vs a liquidation. So it’s a “Nuke Strategy”, which should be open to negotiation.
Positioning:
In the overall scheme of things neither Trevo nor Hamilton make a significant difference, so we trust the cases will be handled by arbitrage if any come close to winning anything. We remain positioned in both SFHG tranches.
Happy to discuss,
Wolfgang
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E: wfelix@sarria.co.uk
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