Rivkin Financial may change name to Scarborough
Changing its name to Scarborough Equities Limited and selling Avcol Stockbroking to IWL for a profit, are two of the big resolutions that the board of Rivkin Financial Services hopes will be passed at its annual general meeting on April 28.
But hoping to spoil the party will be one of RFS’s major shareholders, the Alan Davis Group, who have thrown a spanner in the works of RFS’ plans to offload Avcol to IWL.
RFS today issued shareholders a letter saying that the managing director of the group, Alan Davis, who’s company controls 7.3 per cent of RFS shares, would be canvassing shareholders to support its opposition to the sale.
At the AGM, the RFS board will also be hoping to buy back all shares held by a host of other companies including the Alan Davis Group, Network, IWL-owned Pinnacle Asset Management and Cole Kablow, by selling its holdings in Network and Drillsearch, with the latter’s share price rising substantially in recent times.
Originally, Davis entered into to a buy-back agreement to sell his RFS shares back to RFS in exchange for the Drillsearch shares. This agreement means that Davis would effectively forfeit his voting power at the RFS AGM. But Davis has instituted legal proceedings to get out of the agreement.
Just in case he is successful in his legal challenge to the buy-back agreement, RFS has called on shareholders to support the resolutions. RFS estimates that for every valid vote that Davis and its supporters vote in the negative, at least three votes will need to be cast in the positive for the resolutions to pass.
As well as opposing the buy back of its own shares in RFS and the proposed sale of Avcol, Davis will also be opposing the selective buy-back of the 9 per cent shareholding in RFS held by Network.
Alan Davis picked his holding in RFS back in June 2004, when he was sold shares in the company by disgraced stockbroker Rene Rivkin. At an RFS general meeting last November, shareholders voted to remove Davis as a director and elected Farooq Khan, Christopher Ryan and Simon Cato to the board.
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