SINGAPORE (March 27): Ooi Wooi Jing, another significant shareholder of ISR Capital has started selling shares in the troubled company, which has seen its stock price drop by more than 96% since it resumed trading on March 6 following an SGX-imposed suspension.
In aftermarket announcement on Monday, Ooi was said to have sold a total of 5,445,900 shares at an average of 0.825 cents each last Friday, which generated him $44,928.675 in proceeds. However, even with the sale, Ooi still owns 170 million ISR shares, or 9.9% stake in the company.
Over the past week, the volume of ISR Capital shares traded have picked up significantly, as new shares were converted by Value Capital Asset Management (VCAM), which has an ongoing $35 million redeemable convertible bond programme with ISR Capital.
Between March 22 and March 27, a total of 250 million new ISR Capital shares were added to the company’s share base that now stands at more than 1.7 billion shares. This came from a series of conversion of a sub-tranche of $1 million by VCAM at 0.4 cent per share.
ISR Capital said on March 27 that the latest round of funding from VCAM “should enable” the company to function for the next 12 months.
Ooi isn’t the only significant shareholder to have pared his stake in the company. The first was David Rigoll, the company’s largest shareholder.
On March 6, Rigoll resigned as an executive director from the company, citing, among other reasons, not receiving his pay for February. He promptly started selling a total of 39.3 million shares. He sold nearly 21.3 million shares on March 6 at 4.7 cents each, and 18 million shares on March 7 at 4.48 cents.
Rigoll bought his stake from VCAM last year at 0.5 cent. Even with the sale, he still holds nearly 389.9 million shares, or some 23% of the company.
In a separate announcement on March 27, ISR said it is still trying to find a third valuer to put a dollar figure to a rare earth concession it is trying to acquire in Madagascar.
The earlier two valuation reports have been criticised by SGX for being too similar.
Once the third valuer is found and work completed, the company would then resubmit its revised draft circular to SGX for review and clearance, said ISR.
Rigoll, the largest shareholder, was a former director of Tantalus Rare Earths, a Germany-listed company that used to own the rare earth concession which ISR is trying acquire. This stake was later sold to an entity called REO Magnetic for 3.7 million euros. ISR is trying to acquire a stake in this same concession for $40 million.
News of that planned acquisition sent ISR shares up 4,000% to as high as 33 cents last year, before crashing by more than half to 12.7 cents on Nov 24 – the same day John Soh Chee Wen, alleged mastermind of the 2013 penny stock saga was arrested and held in remand ever since.
Soh is alleged by prosecutors to have manipulated shares in ISR Capital. A pre-trial conference for Soh is scheduled on March 30.
On Monday, ISR Capital shares dropped 28.57% to close at 0.5 cent.
