Media Fallacies
1. Offers were only made to ‘little old ladies’.
Wrong. The information in the shareholder register wouldn't enable discrimination in this fashion. No attempts at selection based on age, occupation, or shareholding, were made at all. If you were young or old, feeble or competent, bright or dim, we were none the wiser. Offers were accepted by a complete cross-section of society and many acceptances were received from professional people such as accountants as trustees for family trusts, lawyers and those holding substantial share parcels. The egalitarian ethos of the offers meant that if you were on the register, you wouldn't miss out.
2. Offers were only made to ‘small shareholders’.
Wrong. Each offer was made to the entire shareholder register.
3. The Share Registration Cases
Well, of course, I'm not — there's no reason to ban someone from a completely legal business activity. But that didn't stop the National Business Review (NBR) printing this as fact as recently as 2019, despite the Editor being advised that this was not the case, (you've got to sensationalize to sell papers, don't you!). A glaring example of the long-established newspaper policy “don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.” This assertion is a media distortion of the correct situation. As part of the settlement in the High Court case involving the ‘deferred payment’ offers, I agreed to not make any further offers of this type. I am free to make the conventional type of ‘below market traded price’ offer if I wish, but of course, that's all irrelevant now as I closed up shop in the off-market offers business back in 2011.
4. The term ‘low ball offer’.
The term ‘low ball offer’ is a sensationalized media description of what in proper technical/legal terms, is known as an ‘off-market offer’. It's a bit like how the media never refer anymore to someone going to prison, they always say that the person was ‘put behind bars’. Or when it rains, it's not referred to as a storm, it's now a ‘weather bomb’. When I made these offers, the phrase ‘low ball offer’ didn't seem to exist. But since then, it entered the media's business lexicon as a way of describing any offer that the media thinks is too low (lovely isn't it, the media deciding how much is to be offered for anything, it would be alright if it was their cheque book involved!).