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Karo Bio - Är Azimuth en bra investerare?

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Nu på morgonkvisten har ny information sett dagens ljus om vilken aktör som ligger bakom Azimuth Opportunity Ltd. Bakom fonden står tydligen Acqua Wellington Asset som är kontrollerad av en investerare vid namn Isser Elishis.

Isser Elishis beskrivs med mindre smikrande ord som "the banker of last resort" och hans fond med orden "a pawn-shop in the investment comunity".

Detta är taget från en artikel om hans affärer:

"On October 12, 2007, Dendreon, still desperate for capital to continue clinical trials that might eventually help its cancer treatment receive FDA approval, signed the paperwork on its first PIPE deal. A dreaded PIPE – the sort of deal that dilutes equity and tends to attract naked short selling that sends a company’s stock into a “death spiral.”

The provider of this PIPE finance was the Azimuth Opportunity Fund, managed by an outfit called Acqua Wellington Asset Management.

Acqua Wellington is controlled by a “prominent” investor named Isser Elishis. In an otherwise flattering article, Herb Greenberg – a journalist whose entire career was devoted to granting “courtesies” to hedge funds in the Milken network – described Elishis as the “banker of last resort.”

Herb, who disappeared from public sight after he was exposed by Deep Capture, now owns a company that ostensibly sells financial research to hedge funds in the Milken network (or, arguably, merely receives payment from them for the extensive string of “courtesies” that Herb extended while working as a journalist).

Among Azimuth’s first forays into the markets was an investment in a company called SulphCo, which claimed to have a method for turning sulphrous crude into clean-burning oil. Elishis collaborated on this deal with SulphCo’s principal investor, Zev Wolfson, who, you will recall, was the investor who financed Milken cronies Carl Icahn, Saul Steinberg, John Mulheren, and various brokerages tied to the Mafia, naked short selling, or both.

SEC data shows that on the day that Dendreon signed its PIPE deal with Azimuth, naked short sellers flooded the market with more than 2 million phantom shares. During the following week, more than a million Dendreon shares “failed to deliver” every day, despite (or perhaps because of) the news that Dendreon had enrolled 500 patients in a trial to confirm its earlier positive results, putting Provenge back on the track to FDA approval. "

Ytterligare artikel skriver:

"Azimuth has bought minority stakes in numerous development stage biotechs in the past. These registered stock deals are similar to PIPEs, or private investment in public equity, and allow the companies to avoid the time consuming and sometimes pricier route of secondary public offering. However, the fund is known as the equivalent of a pawn-shop in the investment community, as their strategy is not to invest for any period of time in the financed companies, but to dump the shares immediately in the market for any profit they can get.

It's usually that only very cash-desperate companies will use Azimuth to raise funds. Often these are start-up biotechs, whose only drug in development has just received a major setback by the FDA, and all other sources of financing have dropped out. In a typical situation in 2009, on November 23, Poniard (PARD) announced it will raise $7.4 mln through the sale of 3.5 million shares at the discount price of $2.15 to Azimuth Opportunity. PARD had just announced a few days earlier that the Phase 3 trial of its lead drug-in-development Picoplatin, has failed to accomplish the tests goals, and the books showed the young bitoech only had the cash to continue operations for 1 or 2 quarters at most. The situation really seemed dire, so when the financing was announced it sounded like good news for PARD. The stock was trading at $2.45 at the time of the announcement. Azimuth started selling its new shares of PARD right away, and the flood of shares offered pushed PARD to a low of $1.92 just 3 days later."

Källor: http://seekingalpha.com/article/227549-microvision-raises-cash-through-last-resort-financier-azimuth-opportunity-fund?source=yahoo
http://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-09/s70809-4614.pdf (nedre del sid 66)
www.deepcapture.com/michael-milken-60000-deaths-and-the-story-of-dendreon-chapter-12-of-15/

Jag hoppas Karo Bio vet vem man hoppat i säng med...

/Pfenix

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