It has also emerged that the Amsterdam-based company faces legal action from Dutch shareholder group VEB if it goes ahead with its plan to exchange convertible bonds for shares, which will reduce the amount of the company’s equity owned by ordinary shareholders from 43% to just 3.5%.
VEB has 12,000 members and represents most of the Netherlands’ major public and private sector pension funds. It labeled the current offer as not acceptable and also cited the inadequate and incorrect dissemination of information by the Getronics’ management in a statement issued last Friday.
Klaas Wagenaar and Axel Ruckert, the recently installed management team at Getronics, do not have many options left. Wagenaar told Reuters news service last Friday that the company was looking at ways of sweetening the deal for shareholders, stating: Somebody’s picking up the bill for this, and those are the shareholders.
Jeroen van Harten, investment analyst at Rabo Securities, told ComputerWire: It is a dangerous situation for the current management, as I expect that working capital will get squeezed and clients are deferring orders. A white knight would be taking on a company with 500m euros of debt, so potential buyers will most likely wait until it pulls through or collapses, and then take out the interesting parts.
Source: Computerwire
