- Additional Proxy Soliciting Materials (definitive) (DEFA14A)
July 16 2009 - 4:31PM
Edgar (US Regulatory)
On Thursday, July 16,
2009 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, Gladstone Investment Corporation (the Company)
held a conference call regarding the proposals included in the Companys
Definitive Proxy Statement, which was filed on July 2, 2009 (the Call).
A script of the Call is attached below.
Thank you Everett for that introduction.
Hello and good morning.
This is a special call to explain the items in the
proxy for shareholders of Gladstone Investment, NASDAQ trading symbol GAIN.
Thank you all for calling in. We are happy to talk to
shareholders and you all know that you have an open invitation to visit us here
in the Washington, DC area. Please stop by at the office in McLean Virginia and
say hello. You will see some of the
finest people in the business.
We invite you all to come to the shareholders meeting
on August 13, 2009 at 11am at the Hilton Hotel in McLean Va. 7920 Jones
Branch Drive. If you are not coming,
then please vote your shares using your proxy so that we get the votes in. You can vote your proxy by mailing in your
proxy card. And you can vote by calling 800 690 6903, but if you call you have
to have your proxy card with the proxy control number. With that control
number, you can also enter your vote at www.proxyvote.com. And you can vote by calling your broker and
your broker can help you vote too.
Before I begin I need to read a statement about
forward looking statements.
This conference call may include
statements that may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning
of Securities Act of 1933 and of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 including
statements with regard to the future performance of the Company.
These forward-looking statements
inherently involve certain risks and uncertainties, even though they are based
on our current plans. We believe those plans to be reasonable.
There are many factors that may
cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results that
are expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements include those
factors listed under the caption Risk factors in all our Form 10K
filings as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and can be found
on our web site at www.GladstoneInvestment.com and the SEC web site.
The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly
update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new
information, future events or otherwise.
Again thank you all for calling in. I know these are trying times for all of you.
As shareholders we have all watched the stock price continue to drop along with
the market for all financial stocks. Some of the financial stocks are off 95%. We have watched the way the market has treated
our stock and just do not understand what is going on. It is a very difficult
time for shareholders.
Before starting with the matters in the proxy, I want you
to know that we will have our quarterly earnings call for the quarter ending June 30,
2009, sometime around the first week in August, so I will not be able to answer
questions about the 10Q we are planning to file for that quarter (or the June quarter
earnings) on this call.
I can say that our fund is performing well in these
trying times compared to others. And just to make sure we all remember, as our
most recent filings showed, this fund does not have any investments in home
mortgages or the housing industry nor do we intend to make any. We have no home mortgages in our portfolio
and never have. Also we do not have
investments in the automobile industry such as suppliers to Ford, GM or Chrysler.
During the quarter ending June 30, 2009 we did
sell most of our syndicated loans in order to repay Deutsche Banks line of
credit. Deutsche Bank declined to renew the line and we attracted BB&T and
Key Bank as our new lenders but we did have to sell most of our senior
syndicated loans to complete the pay off of Deutsche Bank. When we sold these loans
we sold them at a loss so you should expect to see that in the June 30th 10Q
we file.
But please do not ask any questions about the earnings
for the June quarter because until we release our quarterly numbers I
cannot discuss them at all.
Now lets turn to the proxy. In the proxy we have asked
shareholders to vote on a number of things. Some are easy to understand and
others are not as easy.
1. First we are
asking you to elect directors. No need
to explain that because we do that every year.
2. Second we are asking shareholders to approve again a
proposal to authorize our fund to sell shares of our common stock at a price
below our then current net asset value per share. Many Business Development Companies or BDCs are
asking shareholders to do this because almost all the BDCs are selling at below
net asset value per share. As you all
know our fund must pay out 98% of our income to avoid paying taxes. And we do
that each year.
This means the only way to grow is to raise equity or debt. We are limited by law to having less than our
equity in the amount of debt (in other words, a 1:1 debt to equity ratio) so
none of the companies like ours are highly leveraged. And that is a good thing. And we have a line of credit for $50 million. We currently have some capacity on that line.
But this is a revolving line of credit.
In order to grow we will need to raise long term debt
or equity some time in the distant future. With the stock price so low, without
shareholder approval for this proposal, it is not possible in the current
environment except as a rights offering.
As you all know we did a rights offering and it was fully subscribed. So
in that sense the rights offering was a success. What was not good is that some
speculators purchased the rights on the open market, shorted the stock, and
then used the rights to buy the stock at a lower price and cover their short
positions. We were shocked to see how low
the stock fell during that subscription period.
I consulted with three different Investment Bankers on this and followed
their recommendation. But we and other BDCs had the same experience. So rights
offerings are not the most attractive method of raising capital for our fund.
If at the time of the rights offering, we had shareholder
approval to sell stock below net asset value, then we could have instead completed
an overnight stock offering. In light of
the experience that we gained with the rights offering, we now believe that
such an overnight offering might not have the same likelihood of a fall off of
the stock price due to the short interests activity.
We need your vote to put in place this ability to sell
below Net Asset Value in order not to have to do another rights offering. Doing overnight offerings does not let the
short seller come in and push down the stock price.
Shareholders gave us permission to sell at below NAV
last year but the stock price was much too low to sell stock except under the direst
circumstances. I think prices will firm up this year and we will be able to
sell near NAV this year if there are good opportunities for us to invest in.
Let me add one other item. We presently have no intent
to sell stock today at this low price but we need your approval so that when
the stock price recovers we can move forward.
We need to have this proposal to pass so we have an alternative
to a rights offering.
3. Finally we need shareholders to ratify the
selection by our audit committee of PricewaterhouseCoopers as our independent
auditor for the next year end.
Now I must ask all of you to please vote your
shares. It is ever so costly and time
consuming to get shareholders to vote. The fund spends thousands of dollars
trying to contact voters to vote on these issues, so please vote your shares. I would like to pay that money out as a
dividend and not spend it on efforts like this.
Oh, our dividend has been $0.04 per month, a run rate
of $0.48 per year.
As far as we can see out the economy is still
declining and has not begun the recovery. There is a credit squeeze because
banks have slowed down their lending. That hurts the economy a lot. But we can only see a couple of quarters out
so we want to be careful. We are
stewards of your money. We will stay the
course and continue to be conservative in our investment approach.
We invite you all to come to the shareholders meeting
on August 13, 2009 at 11am at the Hilton Hotel in McLean Va. 7920 Jones
Branch Drive. We would like to see you all and talk about the company at that
meeting. If you are not coming, then please vote your shares of stock so that
we get past this. You can vote your
stock by mailing your proxy. You can
vote by calling your broker. And you can
vote by calling 800 690 6903, but you have to have your proxy card with the proxy
control number. If you have your proxy
control number you can vote by going to www.proxyvote.com. If you havent received your proxy in the
mail yet, it should be coming very soon so please look for it, it will include
more information on these proposals, which you should read carefully, and it
will also contain the proxy control number on your card which you will need to
vote by phone or on the internet. But
please vote so we can continue to grow the company.
That is the end of the call. Operator if you would please,
come on and set things up so we can take questions from our listeners.
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