Ann: Trading Halt, page-25

Van Burgen

Not sure I agree with you:

 - why would you write off an intangible asset/s if it's generating a return; not sure you could do it even if you wanted without the auditors agreeing after giving some reason why that asset is not worth what you at least paid for it (and this is not easy to do, else firms will revalue goodwill up/down as they see fit when they want to fudge the accounts)

 - even if they wrote down goodwill, they have sufficient cash to pay off their borrowing (60m in cash, 25m in borrows at Jun2018) so not sure what your point it regarding the goodwill

 - Auditors sign off the accounts; certainly no big 4 auditor will then run away from their signed accounts (CTD paid their auditors ~1m to certify their accounts so they damn well better stand behind the work they did else expect to get sued)

As for cash available for a buy-back.......they have ~60m cash in the bank at the end of June2018 and generated ~70m in cash in 2017, 94m in cash in 2018. So 60m in cash, plus 2019 earnings (~30m conservatively over 4 months), plus an unused debt facility of ~125m, and you easily have access to ~200m in cash to play with. A buy-back of 5-10% is nothing to be sneezed at.