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My friend the bear raider Evil Knievil always tells me that if you discover that a chairman or CEO has told one whopping lie, the odds are that he tells lots of lies. And on that basis unless the company has mammoth asset backing and highly visible earnings and cashflows the shares are a slam dunk short. And that brings me to Terry Bond, the chairman of AIM listed Vialogy (LSE:VIY) who is – as I shall demonstrate below – someone who just last week told a whopping lie. Since his company has minimal (and fast disappearing) asset backing, sod all revenues and is fast running out of cash this company is a slam dunk sell.
I explained yesterday in great detail why Bond et al where trying to ramp their shares with a spurious announcement about shale. Vialogy needs to raise cash fast and it is on a ramp. That alone makes it a stonking short at 2.125p valuing the company at £19 million.
To read my analysis of why Vialogy is almost out of cash and its dire fundamentals click here
And now to that lie. It really is a whopper. As part of its pre placing ramp Vialogy commissioned a soft PR webcast which was aired the other day. Listen to Bond prattle on about quantum physics and new ways of interpreting noise and you should know this company really is all hype and puff. But the killer is when Bond describes the background of his CEO Bob Dean (Robert W Dean)
Bond states explicitly: “he was the right hand man to President Reagan.”
You can listen to the webcast here
As it happens I am a massive Reagan groupie and have read an awful lot about the great man. Tough luck Terry. I have to say that the name Robert Dean does not leap out on every page of most biogs. I would have thought that Ron’s right hand man would have been Caspar Weinberger or James Baker or Ed Meese or that George Bush fellow. So I did a little search at the website of the Reagan library.
Dean did work in the Reagan administration. You can see him here in a list of the top 100 key officials.
http://www.reagansheritage.org/html/reagan_officials.shtml
Oops. No you can’t. Er… he is not on the list. Odd for a fellow who was Reagan’s right hand man.
That is because his highest role was as Special Assistant to the President and NSC 1987-1988. Sounds important? Er. No. There are dozens of “Special Assistants”. They are gophers between the President and whichever department or committee they gopher between. So Dean was not on the NSC he was just one of dozens of special assistants. A sort of higher manager level civil servant.
Doubt me? Back to the Reagan library for a list of White House Staff – check out how many “special assistants” to the President you can find.
Post being “Ronald Reagan’s right hand man” Dean went into the corporate world where Bond insists he had a stack of senior roles. Er… his last job was as Senior Vice President, Corporate Market Development, with Science Applications International Corporation. In the US anyone over 25 is a Vice President (Wikipedia describes the title as “middle management”). SVP is one rung above that. SVP at a divisional level is not a high flier for someone in their late fifties.
Okay so what does it matter that Bond tells an outright lie to make his CEO sound more credible? The fact is that Vialogy is built on trust. Its supporters say that it has contracts with stacks of oil companies to use its drilling technology. but you have to trust Terry and Reagan’s best pal because the big oil companies refuse to announce the deals. Where they do announce (Chevron) we are never told the size of the deals but just have to trust Terry and George Bush, oops I meant Bob Dean.
But we do know the size of the Chevron deal. It is tiny. Contract one completed in the last financial year and even if it was 100% of Vialogy’s consulting revenues it amounted to less than £45,000. I wonder if contract two will be that big. Chevron spens c$30 billion a year on exploration. In other words Vialogy attracted less than 0.0003% of that total spend. Terry blathers on about how excited Chevron is about his company’s technology? Really I think not. Chevron spends more on coffee for its staff each year than it does with his company. It’s technology is that exciting.
The thing is that this technology is almost a decade old. If it really was revolutionary it would by now have made inroads. It simply has not.
Perhaps you still believe in Terry and Bob. Maybe I should refer you to a release from March 2009 where it discussed how its link-up on the Galba oil field in Texas could generate it $4 million over the life of the field. Sadly revenues to date appear to be almost nothing. Revenues from ALL its oil working interests totalled £10,437 in 2011 and just £6,983 last year
So that is the bottom line. This company says things in RNS statements which turn out to be fantasy. There is no correction. This company’s chairman tells an outright lie. Okay. But right now net tangible assets are ( perhaps) £1.6 million and falling rapidly as the cash runs out. And it will be exhausted well before Easter – not helped by a board whose remuneration is a disgrace as I described yesterday HERE
But maybe when Terry promises great things ahead you will trust that after years on non delivery he is telling the truth this time? Personally I have more faith in the tooth fairy.
Target price 0.1p ( and that’s generous).
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Libertarian investment writer Tom Winnifrith writes extensively for a number of US and UK financial websites. All of that material appears on his own blog, which also carries his extensive original non financial material, at TomWinnifrith.com – for alerts on all Tom’s writings (except for that free share tip) follow him on twitter at @tomwinnifrith
You sir, are a cock. You are heading to the courts. Bon chance nob head x
I am no fan of Terry Bond and some of the concerns stated here are perfectly valid at a basic level.
But this article is so overblown! It’s barely worth a reasoned response but suffice it to say if Terry Bond is guilty of exaggeration in his ‘right hand man’ comment — and right hand man is hardly a tightly-defined phrase — it’s a good deal less extreme than much that is overblown in this rant. In short, Winnifrith, if Bond’s off the cuff exaggeration makes him a liar you need to take a long hard look at yourself. There’s a reason why smart folk and barristers used the L word with caution, even in speech.
Beyond that there are claims in here that border on crazed conspiracy theory and a grasp of some realities that’s so weak I would have thought you were at school if you hadn’t published a photo.
I’ll give an example. You say the technology is nearly decade old and would have made inroads if it were revolutionary. Come on! I’ve seen successful and transformational media technologies take longer than that to catch on. And that’s media where there’s less conservatism and, on the whole, lower stakes than in gas and oil.
While we’re on the subject of lies, can you post ANY evidence of ‘supporters’ (your plural) claiming Vialogy has ‘contracts with stacks of oil companies to use its drilling technology’? You will of course have more than one random example if you want to make you point credible. After all you are rather pedantic about other people when it comes to accuracy aren’t you.
Replace Argentina on your shirt with TOM.
You then with have the sentiment towards you and your silly share advice.
Kind regards sharemasterflash.
Ps. Your off to court.
you sir are a Kant of the highest order -leave bob alone he is more of a man then you will ever be !!
leave bob and vialogy they haven’t hurt anyone and are doing fine just
because of your biased article I am going to invest in vialogy tomorrow !
they do not need to prove anything to you ! vialogy one day will become a billion dollar market cap company !
I will be suing your ass for libel
see you in court and say bye bye to your little friend !
One big, useless, smug cretin!
That raviloi is a bit pricey!
Sadly the years that TW spent conning subscribers at t1ps has left him a bitter twisted and lonely man.He now spends much of his lonely life looking to attack CEOs to try and regain some crediblility in the City using fellow dishonest misfits such as BrokermanDan to support his crusade. However, people have long memories and realise this failed tipster/ceo was no better himself at running a Public Company or a marriage.