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Thread ID: 54854	2005-02-24 02:30:00	Tower Insurance	Lurking (218)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
327781	2005-02-24 02:30:00	Does anyone on this chatroom have a letter from Tower Insurance. What the advice, accept their mpayout or take up the shares. Our friends are an elderly couple seeking advice. We had AMP give us policy holders shares, but I haven't read the Tower letter. Any help would be appreciated. Lurking.	Lurking (218)
327782	2005-02-24 02:53:00	This is a bit vague methinks.	ninja (1671)
327783	2005-02-24 03:56:00	Ninja, I was hoping someone with the Tower Insurance letter of acceptance would reply. Only see friends at summer bowls and that finished last night. It's not really a PCWorld OT is it, but you never know, pc users may just have life insurance, with all that poking around with electricity!. Lurking	Lurking (218)
327784	2005-02-24 06:35:00	OK, what your friends will have recieved is a letter from Tower telling them they can subscribe for more Australian Wealth Management shares. Already their existing Tower shares will have reduced in number by about 20%, and they will have been allocated a few AWM shares to make up for that. This is a new company which is the financial management arm of Tower. Effectively Tower is splitting off part of itself into a new listed company. Thus the remaining Tower shares are worth less, but the new AWM shares make up for that. I fully intend to subscribe for more AWM shares but a lot of people won't. AWM will only be listed on the Australian stock exchange, which some Kiwis don't like but really it doesn't matter - you can buy and sell in Oz as easily as here. AWM should be a good company but time will tell. Tower shares have dropped in price and are probably a punt. Here is the thread on Sharetrader for the good oil www.sharetrader.co.nz It is 61 pages long so I started at 59. Good luck. ;)	Winston001 (3612)
327785	2005-02-24 07:44:00	In view of "I fully intend to subscribe for more AWM shares" Winston must have spare lolly which could be put to a better machine of course ....No shortage of PF1 folk to advise on what to get ! Cheers Tony ( short of cash ...)	TonyF (246)
327786	2005-02-24 07:54:00	Winston, thanks for that, it's not a letter but a bl**dy book!. Looks as though they should retain both stocks. Will try and see their letter. Was there anything about taking a cash payout, in lieu of taking up more shares?. Thanks again, Lurking	Lurking (218)
327787	2005-02-24 07:56:00	Tony, haven't you been listening to Dr Cullen, put your money into shares not property!. Wished he would give us back some tax, so that we could do just that. Lurking.	Lurking (218)
327788	2005-02-24 08:33:00	I had no intention of holding shares in AWM and missed selling Tower at a good price by about 2-3 days, so what to do? I sold the AWM shares and rights and the nett proceeds, after brokerage and FX, turned out to be $3.39 per Tower share "lost" on consolidation - not bad compared to the CMV of about $1.90. BUT, we should be asking ourselves "why?". Why would Tower do this? Methinks it is not Tower's decision but a GPG "play". Why would GPG do this? Maybe they think the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole - classic Ron Brierley stuff. But is it? It was the Australian operations that dragged Tower down - Bridges had all sorts of problems. How much of the rights proceeds will go to the Bridges capital adequacy ratio and how much into the Tower coffers? Either way it will hardly be to the benefit of Bridges. Have the Bridges problems been resolved? Who knows? (Other than the board of Tower) How much additional corporate costs will Bridges have to bear once it has broken away? And so the questions go on .... amongst all of the questions, where is the logic? Follow the money. If any of the funds from the AWM rights issue goes to Tower (as part of the settlement) what will they do with it? Again the GPG play would see a special distribution to shareholders, if there is any sort of capital repayment. So is the AWM spin-off a way of releasing cash for Tower shareholders? Or a way of limiting the Tower liability to the Bridges problems thereby protecting the investment of GPG? Or is there something else in this for GPG? I don't understand why they would put Bridges (AWM) out on it's own if it was performing poorly. If the problems were that bad it wouldn't stand a chance. If that is the case, then GPG, being the rights issue underwriters and probably principal shareholder, would probably be happy to see the bottom fall out of the AWM share price, only to soak up control of AWM at a very cheap price. Once they have control, it will be another case of the "fox in charge of the chicken coop", as it was with GPG and the Aussie fund manager they owned (and sold) a few years back (the name eludes me for the moment). So GPG have been here before and if I am certain of one thing, they will be looking out for their interests. You also have to ask how much "goodwill" was sold by Tower to Bridges? Goodwill is worth squat if a company is making losses. As for the premature talk of AWM being "too small" and a potential takeover target - hogwash! How many years did we hear that about Tower? And there was never anything close to a takeover of Tower. So why talk up the AWM share price with such obvious propaganda this early on? My prediction? The bottom will drop out of AWM in a few months, it will be good cheap buying for a year or two and will recover in 2-3 years when we will see GPG bail out. Predictable GPG/Brierley play. So why is the AWM share price hovering between A$1.07 and A$1.10 - the fund managers are buying their allotments (hence the propaganda), they are buying up the volumes they need to make up their portfolios. Who else would be buying now? Not GPG - they can get AWM shares cheaper through underwriting the rights issue. Not the Mom and Pop shareholders - why would they buy more shares when the Tower returns have been so dismal for the past few years? It can only be the fund managers and their buying won't last. So I will buying up large later this year when they hit A50c or thereabouts. Of course I am happy to be proved wrong..... My 2c :D	andrew93 (249)
327789	2005-02-24 09:01:00	Clearly Andrew93 is at home with all this stuff. We could all start a PF1 Club where we pass dosh to Andrew for investing at vast profits, so that we can all upgrade as advised by Metla .... ( or am I dreaming ???) Cheers Tony	TonyF (246)
327790	2005-02-24 09:30:00	Hah! Thanks for the vote of confidence Tony. I've been following Tower and GPG for a while, and when Tower had a rights issue at 90c I went in boots and all. :thumbs: Although my friends made more than I did - D'Oh! When you start seeing shares being discussed by "the average Joe" (no offence intended to any of the learned readers of, and contributors to, PF1) then it is definitely time to sell. *A93 slinks off to place a sell order or three ....* As for passing the dosh, yeah bring it on! Be my guest! BTW, does NZ have an extradition agreement with Ireland yet? :D	andrew93 (249)
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