Gunns’ White Knight gallops in. Pollies, Lara. Tom Ellison: ‘It’s desperation’
DealBook, NYT, Wall St Journal
08.02.12 7:07 am
• Yesterday on Tasmanian Times: Richard Chandler is a major shareholder in Sino-Forest, a Chinese-Canadian company whose principle businesses include the ownership and management of plantations; sale of standing timber and logs; and manufacturing of wood products. Sino-Forest is currently facing charges of fraud in Canada, and is being investigated by Canadian authorities. Its shares fell more than 70% after these allegations were laid and the company has been placed in a trading ban having lost most of its value, and the company is teetering on bankruptcy. Is this Gunns’ White Knight ... ? PtM’s message to Mr Chandler: HERE Ed: It should be noted that Chandler bought into Sino-Forest when Sino’s shares plummeted after the allegations were made, as the Financial Post report makes clear.
• DealBook, NYT, August 26, 2011: Sino-Forest has been the subject of considerable controversy since June, when Muddy Waters Research issued a report by a short-seller, Carson Brock, that called the company a “multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme” that was “accompanied by substantial theft.” A reporter for The Globe and Mail of Toronto subsequently spent two weeks visiting various properties ostensibly owned or controlled by Sino-Forest and its subsidiaries. It proved to be a trek that frequently led him to nonexistent addresses and empty offices. Like Muddy Waters, the newspaper also found evidence that Sino-Forest had greatly inflated the size of its forestry assets. After the accusations, Sino-Forest’s stock price tumbled and the hedge fund manager John Paulson, who had been one of the company’s largest shareholders, dumped his shares. His hedge fund, Paulson & Company, which had owned 35 million shares, is estimated to have lost nearly $500 million on Sino-Forest.
• Financial Post, Sep 8, 2011. Last Updated: Sep 12, 2011: Sino’s extended halt spurs debate The decision was crucial because shares of Sino were climbing even though there was little reliable information about the besieged company. Retail investors appeared to be following the lead of a pair of large institutional investors, Wellington Management LP, and the Richard Chandler Corp., which were aggressively buying shares in the weeks after short-seller Muddy Waters LLC accused the company of fraud. In fact, Richard Chandler bought 1.2 million shares on Aug. 24. That very afternoon, commission staff were informed that two Sino vice-presidents had been temporarily suspended, according to an affidavit sworn by a senior OSC forensic accountant. The next day, OSC staff learned of the suspension of a third vice-president.
• Wall St Journal, February 1, 2012: Sino-Forest Probe Fails to Answer Key Questions The independent committee investigating fraud allegations at Chinese timber company Sino-Forest Corp. issued its final report but failed to answer key questions about the company’s accounting, including whether it valued its assets correctly.
• Gunns Ltd: Gunns recapitalisation to raise up to $280 million: Plantation company Gunns Limited has agreed commercial terms for the introduction of a $150 million investment from the Richard Chandler Corporation (RCC)
• Today’s Share Price: HERE
• Brown puts pulp mill opposition to Chandler: The polluting pulp mill cuts right across Tasmania’s ‘clean, green and clever’ branding and it is only fair that Mr Chandler knows at the outset that the pulp mill proposal is a dinosaur which should be extinct.
• Tom Ellison, Wills Financial Group: Gunns treating shareholders with contempt: The proposed capital raising smacks of desperation, and will do little to help the company’s precarious financial position.
• Kim Booth, Greens Forestry Spokesperson: New undertaker for Gunns, as Banks Retreat And Shareholders Burnt
• Vica Bayley, Tasmanian Campaign Manager, TWS: Chandler could move Gunns and Tamar from pulp mill disaster
• Lara Giddings, MP, Premier: Gunns investment welcome
Lindsay Tuffin
08.02.12 6:09 am
Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you pinch yourself; wondering if it is all real.
Pontville closure deadline looms: take action!
Emily Conolan Founder, Tasmanian Asylum Seeker Support (TASS) http://www.tasasylum.org http://www.facebook.com/tasasylum
08.02.12 6:00 am
I must be confused about the date ...
John Maddock. Tess Lawrence
08.02.12 4:05 am
John Maddock: But as I say, I must be confused about the date, because I’ve read and heard about the Victorian bushfires which happened on this date 3 years ago, but nothing about what happened in southern Tasmania 45 years ago. I ‘spose the media knows what day it is.
Tess Lawrence: More than 7000 Taswegians found themselves homeless. My own family amongst them. In a bizarre co-incidence, both Black Tuesday and Victoria’s fires happened in February – and exploded on the same date – the 7th – 42 years to the day !
Why the role of our Head of State is important
Lisa Singh
08.02.12 4:00 am
Lisa Singh
Why an Australian Head of State? Because it is only the republics of the world which have the political institutions on which to etch out national values and a national identity. It is exactly the President and the republican ethic on which American values could evolve British liberties; and it is only a republic which will enable Australian values to fully come into their own.
Who exactly has the frontal lobe damage?
Maggie Maguire
08.02.12 3:56 am
Whitaker’s book is still a must-read however and his passionate plea for less emphasis on drugs and more people centred therapies at the end of the book makes for great reading. His indictment of the treatment of children with psychotropic medication is also right on target. His mention of the fact that schizophrenia researcher and author of The Broken Brain, Nancy Andreasen has said that she has unpublished findings from MRI scans that the more drugs taken the bigger loss of brain tissue is a wake-up call:
Greens call for state phase-out of solariums
Paul O’Halloran MP Greens Health Spokesperson MR.
08.02.12 12:19 am
Positive Step for Cancer Prevention
Is this Gunns’ White Knight ... ? PtM’s message to Mr Chandler
Edited by Sarah Thompson, Christine Lacy and Stephen Shore, The Australian Financial Review. Pulp the Mill
07.02.12 1:04 pm
Chandler, who is one of Singapore’s richest individuals, has invested in a wide range of industries including telecommunications, power, steel, banking and energy. In November, he acquired a 15 per cent interest in the Abbot Point LNG facility. He has a reputation for buying into and shaking things up at undervalued companies and working towards a re-rating of the stock, which would be a big win for long-suffering Gunns investors. He is believed to have approached Gunns before Christmas. Chandler is the biggest shareholder in Canadian forestry group Sino-Forests.
• Lucy Landon-Lane, Pulp The Mill: Ms Landon Lane said, “The Tamar Valley community has a simple message for Mr Chandler - don’t bet on Gunns as you will lose just as you did with Sino Forest. The parallels between the companies Gunns and Sino-Forest are all in the negatives, not the positives. Gunns too is facing a class action, and legal action to challenge the validity of the pulp mill permits, handed down through a corrupt assessment process.”
• Geoff Law, in Comments: Mr Chandler needs to know that the assessment of Gunns’ pulp mill was corrupted beyond redemption. The independent RPDC assessment was jettisoned when it found the proposal ‘critically non-compliant’. The Premier Paul Lennon engaged a pulp-industry consultant to undertake the state assessment based on the wrong guidelines, thereby failing to properly assess impacts of fugitive odours and marine pollution. Even this assessment found that the mill would not comply with all of the environmental conditions. The federal government’s assessment was compromised by being restricted to ‘Commonwealth’ environmental issues, such as marine waters over 5 km from Tasmania’s shore. Claims by Gunns that the mill will use only plantations are already under severe question, with some claiming that pulpwood will have to be imported from Victoria and South Australia. (Instead of using local native forests? Fat chance) The corruption of this process means that no assurance about the mill’s environmental impacts given by Gunns or either government is based on authoritative, independent, integrated, scientific work.
McKnight on Murdoch, 7pm tonight, Michael Veitch, ABC Radio
Editors
07.02.12 1:03 pm
Dr David McKnight, Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales, is being interviewed about media mogul Rupert Murdoch on ABC statewide in Tasmania, with Michael Veitch. At 7pm.
• Syria, Bahrain and Yemen get worst ever rankings in Reporters Without Broders Press Freedom Index 2011-2012
Milne: Is Forestry Tasmania in China selling forests at a loss? Brown: World Heritage deception
Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne. Leader, Senator Bob Brown
07.02.12 1:00 pm
• Christine Milne: Both Forestry Tasmania and Minister Green owe Tasmanians an explanation as to why they think it is acceptable to sell off our magnificent forests at a loss.
• Bob Brown: The Australian Government is putting forward a submission to an international committee that essentially does not tell the truth about what is happening in Tasmania’s forests.
New film festival to reveal the darker side of the female psyche
Briony Kidd
07.02.12 12:23 pm
Stranger With My Face is the creation of award-winning Tasmanian filmmakers Briony Kidd and Rebecca Thomson and is an official ‘Women in Horror Recognition Month’ event.
Gabrielle Rish
07.02.12 5:15 am
Sarah Kanowski with the sell-out edition of Island, which featured Geoff Dyer’s Archibald entry painting of David Walsh
BookMark is a regular column focusing on Tasmanian writers, publications and literary events. Literature, with celebrity exceptions, is not a pursuit that makes significant money. This is not a failure of the arts but an example of the difference between cost and worth. The same applies to hospital beds and school desks. Yet as [British political historian Tony] Judt pointed out, public conversation is so eviscerated that to value public goods ill-served by the working of the profit motive is to now appear hopelessly idealistic and naïve.
Local government, land value, Labor and Leo ...
Margot Giblin
07.02.12 5:10 am
Leo Foley on the HCC steps. Pic: Margot Giblin
TT: Do you belong to a political party? LF: No. I did once. I signed up to Labor when Jim Bacon became Leader of the Opposition. When he went, and after a couple of years of Lennon, I resigned. I couldn’t live with the new style.
Species dying out on Labor’s watch
Cassy O’Connor MP Greens Environment spokesperson MR
07.02.12 5:08 am
936 endangered, 28 already extinct, 246 have no up to date status The ecological importance of preserving our high conservation value forests can be lost in the debate about the timber industry. But logging our old-growth forests isn’t just economic madness. It continues the quiet genocide of Tasmania’s animal and plant life too.
Asylum seekers battle - Keep Pontville open
Helen Kempton, Mercury
07.02.12 5:07 am
Tasmanians have a week to convince Immigration Minister Chris Bowen to cop some political fallout and keep the Pontville Detention Centre open, Brighton Mayor Tony Foster says. If you support the campaign to keep Pontville open email Mayor Foster at Tony.Foster@brighton.tas.gov.au
The $200,000 prisons chief on Twitter ...
Peter, with help from David Killick, Mercury
07.02.12 5:07 am
Unguarded twitter entry - since removed, but not before Peter snapped it ...
A FORMER British prisons chief has been recruited into the $220,000 a year job as change manager at the troubled Risdon Prison.
Are 35 Fools More Talented Than 25?
Nigel Burch
07.02.12 5:04 am
So how easy would it be to just ask the public servants how to save money? A piece of cake you would think. But no-one is asking them! All Lara has to do is work out a way of tapping into this enormous pool of insider knowledge. And I’ve already told her how to do it. Don’t accept the advice of the Permanent Secretaries – order them to make cuts without loss of services and at the same time empower all the advisers to talk direct to public servants in their departments off the record. Make the advisers in effect a pool of efficiency experts. They will get an avalanche of good ideas and cost-saving measures and avoid having to sack a single front-line service provider such as a policeman or nurse.
It’s so simple.
1792: Growing when D’Entrecasteaux explored the Huon
Jenny Webber, Huon Valley Environment Centre MR
06.02.12 5:00 am
Photo: Ula Majewski
Conservationists Protest Old Growth Logging for Ta Ann After conducting citizen science in the logging area, tree ring counting found that the logged celery top pine was 280 years old, starting its growth at approximately 1732. Using the methodology of dendrochronological techniques, we have indicated that this celery top pine was growing in this forest that is now being destroyed, when the Huon was being explored by D’Entrecasteaux in1792.
The Tragedy of Tasmania’s Forests: One act on from Flanagan
Peter Kanowski. Island Magazine
06.02.12 4:49 am
The shared tragedy of these two most recent acts in the Tasmanian forests play is that both represent ‘go for broke’ strategies on the part of the dominant actors – first Gunns Ltd and their supporters, and now the environmental movement. In both cases, it is the less extreme positions and possibilities for Tasmania’s forests and forest-based industries that have been marginalised through the politics of power and exclusion. The failure of the polity, at both state and federal levels, to act on behalf of the many, less powerful and generally more moderate, interests in the community is no less reprehensible now than it was then, where it was rightly and roundly criticised by Flanagan and others.
Republished with the permission of Island Magazine. Island 127 available now from good bookshops and newsagents.
Nick Clark, Mercury
06.02.12 4:45 am
The company expects to announce the capital raising and equity investment by Wednesday morning.
• Barnaby Drake: If I were a God, I would make lobbying a Cardinal Sin!
• Download FSC briefing papers ...
Bronwyn Williams
06.02.12 4:43 am
Forestry in Tasmania is a shit-fight, and there are heaps of contenders slinging the turds. Bloodsucking corporations, opportunistic politicians, inept public servants, debt-laden operators, and more industry groups than you can poke a stick at – all intent on maintaining a way of functioning that is no longer viable. And the supreme enabler of their intent appears to be Forestry Tasmania.
What can be done?
Today
• The Tragedy of Tasmania’s Forests: One act on from Flanagan • Travels around Tasmania with some latte sippers • Bobby-z ... and the Miners of Potosi • MIS growers felled again • Ancanthe ... all that will be lost
• A Silent Vigil in solidarity with the Tibetans in Tibet • Recumbent Ride Raises Rehabilitation Responsibility • Tom Lewis shatters our preconceptions on the realities of combat. • Tasmania Sets the Standard • Marvellous, Magnificent Miriam!
• Bryan in Asia ... • Bryan’s trade mission • Julia, you are safe with me ... and LATEST NEWSPOLL poll • Brand Tasmania • Dr Karl’s Flaccid Pill
Come off it. Bowen knows its not wanted. Close it.
• New film festival to reveal the darker side of the female psyche • Marvellous, Magnificent Miriam! • How epigenetics will transform our understanding of health and disease • Launching Flight • Send the Love party