Asiasons co-founder pares his stake, retires from board
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Shares up yesterday at four cents, still a shadow of last October’s high of $2.83
Anita Gabriel
07 May 2014
Beaten and bruised, Asiasons Capital shares have suffered much pain but, unlike many of its penny stock cohorts, the private-equity firm and its top executives are not being investigated by Singapore’s white-collar crime buster for possible breaches of securities laws.
After getting battered to a low of 3.8 cents on Monday, Asiasons shares gained some ground yesterday, ending the day some 5 per cent higher at four cents, still a far cry from the high of $2.83 it hit last October days before the stock came crashing down.
Amid the penny stock controversy surrounding trading in its shares and investigations into several firms linked to it by the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD), one of Asiasons’ founders and chairman, Mohammed Azlan Hashim, has called it a day at the firm.
On April 28, the firm said the 57-year-old, a prominent corporate figure in Malaysia, had volunteered to retire as non-independent and non-executive chairman, a post he had held for seven years.
He did the same at Chaswood Resources Holdings where he was chairman since April 2012. Asiasons owns more than 60 per cent of Catalist-listed Chaswood.
Four days before that, he sold his entire interest in two vehicles which own 49.3 per cent stake in Asiasons, leaving him with a 3.8 per cent direct interest in Asiasons.
The two vehicles - Asiasons Investment Managers and Porterhouse Capital - were jointly owned by Mr Azlan and Asiasons’ two other co-founders, Jared Lim and Ng Teck Wah, who are also the firm’s joint managing directors. Mr Ng also retired from Asiasons’ board as director over a week ago.
The Business Times understands that Mr Lim has bought over Mr Azlan’s shares in the investment holding company.
Should Mr Azlan have opted out amid the firestorm involving Asiasons? It is a fair question, said a governance hawk.
“Is he doing the right thing by leaving the board whilst the company is under siege? There is no legal requirement for a director to ride it out and stay whilst a company is in trouble, though it is often argued that he has a moral duty to do so,” said the legal expert.
In Asiasons’ annual report 2013, Mr Azlan said given that he was controlling shareholder, his voluntary retirement would make way for the appointment of a new chairman who is independent and was in line with best practices.
The soft-spoken gentleman ought to be well versed with best practices - he was once the boss of Malaysia’s stock exchange and currently sits on the boards of the country’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional and IHH Healthcare, among others.
The impact of last October’s penny stock crash has been devastating on the firm and frustrating for its founders.
At the height of the turbulence in October last year, a beaten-down Mr Azlan, who is well regarded in the investing fraternity, lamented that some people were “trying to paint us as a bunch of cowboys out to do bad things but we are long-term shareholders”.
After months of struggling to keep the deal afloat, Asiasons’ major acquisition of Texan oil and gas firm Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations fell through in March this year.
It sank into the red for the year ended December 2013 with a loss of $92 million.