are these people guilty, page-10

I find it amusing that Maccas bought 8% to block a wind-up. This makes no sense.

Maccas is up for $195M on its stake, plus other costs, and it is trying to force people to pay money when it knows they can't. What is it hoping to do? Force the holders back to market to sell their shares to Insto's who somehow have hundreds of millions of dollars burining holes in their pockets and can somehow not do mathematics sufficient to realise they are getting in to an overgeared dead whale carcass?

I actually thought about the Bolton treatment a while back when the shares were 0.1 cents. Buy a sizeable percentage for sod all, and just sit back and let them come to you with their letters and throw your hands in the air and say "so, take my non-existent house and try to gtake my wife's car, I have absolutely no money to pay your instalments".

After all, as an individual or even a married couple the Cstouros' can declare bankruptcy and walk away. The court cannot get any more money out of them than they actually have - and it isn't going to help anyone to garnishier their wages, they can just get fired and sit on the dole.

Brisconnections is a stupid structure, plain and simple. Putting tradeable shares on the market which come with an obligation for $2 a share of future payments is fine if you can make sure that people never buy more than they can afford to pay up for, and if your insto's and funds which hold them remain static with their holdings and remain keen to tip money into the pot in the future.

The moment the shares begin concentrating in the hands of private investors like Bolton and the Cstouros's then the listed structure has failed and should be dissolved.

In essence, Bolton's gambit is a valid and smart move. He's not stupid. He can wind the company up and force the div out (it was, after all, promised). The company has more cash than not; it has no absolute obligation to fund the project. In fact, Bolton can argue it cannot in truth fund the project at this stage because hundreds of millions of dollars of money is flapping about unable to be paid. Therefore, technically, it is insolvent.

The other factor is that it does have a contract to manage and build the infrastructure. My thoughts were that if you could buy a huge enough stake, you could basically extort money out of the government and insto's and banks by saying "if you don't buy my shares off me for what I want to sell them, you won't get your money, and the company will have to be wound up."

Now it seems that at least one of the insto's and banks is on this line of thinking. Maccas doesn't want the company wound up because it'll have to write off assets and fees worth, I would argue, more than the $195M of liabilities it's picked up with its 8% stake. And if Bolton wins, it doesn't actually HAVE those liabilities anymore.

Bolton, as I've said, isn't stupid. He's going to turn a profit from this one way or the other. The brisconnections guys are absolutely screwed, with a funding model shot to hell, a government unable to just pick up the pieces, and instos and banks trying to force mum and dad punters to pay their instalments.

The Cstouroses should actually do one thing: pick up another 4 million BCS at whatever price, and therefore guarantee they are so far in the stink that their house becomes meaningless vs the debt. Their only problem is that Maccas and BCS can probably get 80% of the commitment from them by enforcing a sale of their house. If they make sure the house becomes <1% of their debt, then the bank will be cheque-mated. They should realise their risk doesn't actually increase the more BCS they buy, it in effect decreases.