Trustco’s see-saw share mystery
The wildly fluctuating value that CEO Quinton van Rooyen puts on the company shares raises eyebrows
Many market watchers might have believed it could not possibly get any weirder at Namibian investment company Trustco.But it just did.Last week Trustco detailed changes to its proposed $25m purchase of 51% of the Meya diamond mining venture in Sierra Leone — offering the seller, Germinate, a mix of scrip and cash rather than the cash payment envisaged when the deal was announced in August 2016.Of course, a change in the settlement structure hardly ranks as an extraordinary twist.But this is no straightforward placement of Trustco paper with vendors. What happened was that Quinton van Rooyen — the founder, majority shareholder and CEO of Trustco — offered 30.2-million of his own shares to settle $20m of the $25m purchase price.The placement — struck at 960c a share — is deemed part of the R1bn loan deal that Van Rooyen, who appears to be the lender of last resort, arranged with Trustco.This loan arrangement has, until the new Meya settlement terms were announced, mainly involved Van...
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