The ignominious saga of Omnimedia Plc, the company that gave multimedia a bad name throughout the city of London, has come to an end with an agreed reverse takeover by IT recruitment and consultancy group Sales Engineering and Computer Consultants Ltd SEC in a 17m pound deal. SEC, which recorded net income of 965,000 pounds on revenues of 9.2m pounds in 1997, has two recruitment and four consulting divisions. It offers IT consultancy, technical support and has developed a range of software products that enable AS/400, NT and Unix data to be accessed from PCs. Under terms of the deal, Omnimedia will acquire the share capital of SEC by issuing 28.3 million shares and SEC will raise 5m pounds from a private placement of shares and 3m pounds for a rights issue to provide additional working capital. The company will be called Systems International Group and SEC founder Nick Reid, who will own 58% of the capital, will be managing director. The former Omnimedia board will all quit, an unlamented departure for a company which seemed desperate to fail. Omnimedia shares topped the 50 pence mark in 1996 at a time when. in any word association test, city dealers would respond to ‘multimedia’ with ‘money’. They quickly learned that ‘misery’ would be a better link as the shares headed steadily downwards over the following year after losses hit 2.3m pounds in 1996 as the directors poured other peoples’ money into doomed projects covering everything from publishing, authoring tools and music videos. Omnimedia was able to survive as a shell because its main operations disappeared into a subsidiary that went into liquidation. There is still a 6m pound deficit on the profit and loss account which will be spirited away quite legally under a scheme devised by sharp city minds. Omnimedia’s hapless shareholders will, under a 60-1 share consolidation be rewarded by the equivalent of one pence a share plus the right to subscribe to the rights issue – a package that the market values at 2.5 pence a share. The one asset of Omnimedia left is a CD-Rom called The Kidnapped Princess which is being sold off for 13,500 pounds.
