RE:RE:A complete regime change needed starting with the CFOHi Teddy,
I fully agree with your observations and the excerpts on how to identify bad Directors and management. On almost every count Torstar would be exemplary for how not to run a company. To the best of our knowledge management hasn’t engaged in any obvious accounting fraud, but that would take a level of sophistication they don’t possess. They are apparently satisfied to allow gross incompetence to guide the future of the organization without compounding the calamities by resorting to illegal activities.
It is a complete mystery how this gang of Directors can sit around the boardroom table quarter after quarter and not call out the malarkey they are being fed for what it is. I have detailed the long list of uninterrupted failures and yet not one Directors has resigned on principle. For some, this is their only public board, but some have far more experience and should know better. One has to assume collecting the fees and pretending to add value trumps exercising your fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of all shareholders.
The Voting Trust’s complicity is unfathomable. Allowing Honderich to hoodwink them into believing whatever line of craziness he disguises as a transformation plan is complete madness. In the 2009 Annual Report, Honderich begins with “2009 was a year of transition, transformation and consolidation for Torstar.” Ten years later as a Voting Trust member, you’d have to ask how that transformation has worked out for us?
In January 2009 the Voting Trust had an equity value of $181.1 million and were collecting annual dividends of $8.3 million. Today their equity value is $17.1 million and dividends are $2.2 million. Nothing better illustrates the cost of incompetence and hereditary justice when those who inherit great wealth find a way to let it slip through their clumsy hands. The unfortunate consequences are felt by all B shareholders who are held hostage by a Voting Trust incapable of exercising a modicum of common sense.
Keep buying the shares, collecting the dividends and waiting for the purge to begin. It will happen and not soon enough for all.