Notice to Voting Trust – December 2018
Time to admit you don’t have the answers and step aside
Dear Voting Trust Members,
Sometime this month you will be presented with the 2019 Torstar Business Plan and Forecast for 2018. Please take note of the following:
1. The significant and growing gap between the 2018 Budget and the 2018 Forecast. Whatever you were promised this time last year did not happen. There will be plenty of excuses and people to blame, but the buck stops with you. The CEO and CFO are barely competent on good days and you have presided over this clown act for far too long. These two guys are just the latest iteration. You have been sold a bill of goods and time to recognize you have been taken to the cleaners.
2. The 2019 Business Plan will be filled with all kinds of wild promises about the number of paywall subscriptions, the StarMetro expansion and performance, Freddy Krueger’s magical editorial skills, the tons of money that will flow from the feds, the big take-up on Wall Street Journal subscriptions, how well iPolitics is doing, the incredible current and future performance of VertigoScope and all of the transformational gobbledygook around data infrastructure, advanced analytics capabilities and customer lifecycle management capabilities. This is all intended to make you feel both good and stupid at the same time. You will be afraid to drill into the gobbledygook because you don’t want to look incompetent. All of the other fabricated feelgood promises will turn out to be a pack of lies to allow Boynton and his gang of high-priced hucksters line their pockets until you run out of cash and time.
3. You have very little else to sell to raise cash and VertigoScope is a cash blackhole that none of you understands. Just like StarTouch, you didn’t do your due diligence and got fleeced. Was there a line-up to buy 56% of the company? I didn’t think so and you blew your last pile of cash on a house of cards.
4. Some of you have been on the Voting Trust for 50 years and have seen the fortunes rise and fall to where the shares are worth less than a buck. Time to admit you can’t sort this one out and don’t have the financial resources at this stage to take a good run at saving the Torstar ship. It can be saved, but not on your watch and with the current leadership of the company.
I hope someone has slipped this message under your doors or forwarded it to your email. I don’t have the time or interest in mailing this information to you anymore.
I remain,
A Concerned B shareholder