RE:RE:RE:One thing BB investors are wrong about.....Yasch, Your posts are generally balanced. However, when it comes to Prem Watsa and the 2020 Debentures, they are not.
In your last post you state:
"Watsa however was (and is) a Canadian enterprise nationalist. A fair number of times in his Fairfax investing career he has bought Canadian businesses with a view to keeping them intact during a rough period, and then benefiting from the whole company's rebound."
----------This statement makes PW appear altruistic when it comes to other shareholders. The Judge's comments in the Resolute Forest decision concerning PW suggests otherwise.
"All three debenture deals that BB has signed (2013, 2016, 2020) feature Fairfax as the dominant buyer. All three have helped to scare off corporate raiders and/or leveraged buyout pirates. Watsa also has the biggest voice on the board of directors, given that he's the chair. And he's used that voice to set up a compensation structure that
(a) scares off the raiders, because they'd have to pay all of the promised bonuses to the C-suite even if not a single benchmark was attained
(b) rewards the CEO and other executives for growing BB as a national tech champion, not for selling the company on any given day for a 25 to 40% premium."
--------I think it is more than fair criticism to suggest the Debentures could have been refinanced better than they were/ more effort made to get best terms. Your posts fail to point out the lower US$6 conversion price and the dilution. The fact that BB had to TWICE amend the 2020 Debenture terms/ offering to comply with OSC/ TSX rules following Dorsey Gardiner's press releases seem to be proof that criticism was/ is fair. Rather incredible that changes to the terms/ offering were effectively forced upon BB.
" ... Everyone here should force themselves to remember what the bullboards were saying between mid-March and mid-July 2020. The share price during that time hovered between $3 to $4.80 US, or $4.15 to $6.50 CAD....
...Then there was a whole lot of outrage when people started realizing that the renewed debenture deal would be a roadblock to a takeover."
------------This is a skewed recollection, if not plain wrong. There was far more outrage that the BB board did not market the deal/ do more to ensure BB was getting the best terms/ least dilution possible. June 2020 was just 3 months after the worst of Covid19's impact on markets, and I agree that the jury was still out, and thus there was risk associated with the renewal of the debentures in Nov 2020. But there was also risk that the board could sell BB/ its prospects short by doing the deal as early as they did, on those terms.