Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

personally I felt that at that stage in 2021 the kerry shares were in a “dead cat bounce” phase. They’d fallen from €128.50 to €88.50 and like a dead cat bounced back to €115, I felt it wouldn’t last. By 2021 we had at that stage as shareholders voted to reject the 2019 share redemption scheme, in April 2021 we missed the giant iceberg that was the JV, I felt it was all going nowhere and genuinely from the bottom of my heart had lost all faith in the co-op management. Funnily enough one of the main reasons I sold was because the co-op kept sending me legal letters threatening to expel me from the co-op and take my shares off me. The irony is that I may have never sold up if it wasn’t for those people in the co-op management that were so intent on pushing me out the door. Then when I agreed to sell my co-op shares in May 2021 the next board meeting where it could go through was August, the board blocked the sale of my shares at that and they didn’t go through until November 2021 and a house that I was interested in dropped its asking price from €250,000 to €240,000 during the time that the co-op has the sale of my shares all held up and I ended up getting the house for €238,000 so the co-op actually made me money by blocking the sale of my shares. It’s just funny because everything they did back then seemed to backfire, obviously we’ve a new chairman now and a new co-op board for the most part

There was no real logic to the legal letters.

The co-op tried to have the share redemption written into the co-op rule book in 2019 and I spoke out against it because we the shareholders were being asked to reduce the value of the co-op shares from 6.12 to 5.9 and sign away the right to any cash that was there, off the top of my head that would of meant the shareholders voting to say they basically didn’t want €150 million of their own money and that money would of been a sort of investment fund for the co-op, at the time there was co-op directors going around telling people the co-op was going to borrow €400 million on the strength of the rest of the shares that the co-op had in kerry group. The last time the co-op went off investing money on our behalf had been One51, that ended badly to say the least. The co-op was telling people they’d be able to redeem their co-op shares at a ratio of 5.9 kerry group shares per co-op share, because of “participation exemption” which is a tax law that meant what the co-op was telling shareholders was lies. Kerry Co-op owns 11% of kerry group, when that drops to 5% the co-op itself will have to pay 33% CGT on the sale or transfer of its shares in kerry group so instead of having 5.9 shares available for shareholders it would only have bad 3.95 - that’s an absolute fact. There was 100 more reasons to vote against that redemption scheme, mainly it’s designed for self designated pension funds to buy shares off farmers like me and after a few weeks be able to cash them in and make a 30% profit. Best of luck to those guys that bought the shares off me and made a €200,000 profit after a few weeks of owning them, the problem I have is with the co-op board, imagine having €700,000 in a bank account and being told by the lady behind the counter that you can only have €500,000 of it and they’re gonna give €200,000 of it away to a stranger standing next to you.

Then I spoke out against the JV in 2021. Some “seafield documents” leaked in April of that year, I imagine the co-op must of known for a 100% fact who it was that leaked them because they never even attempted to blame me for it and by then I was their go too guy to blame for everything. Anyway the JV was literally throwing we the shareholders under a big bus. I put my money where my mouth was and spoke out against it very publicly and when I went for selling my shares later that year the co-op board blocked the sale of my shares and what I heard back at the time was that the co-op board were largely very against my shares being blocked and a lot of them were threatening to resign from the board over it even in fairness to them. The whole thing kind of blew up big time. The co-op board were being compared with North Korea etc in national papers, long story short it got sorted out and my shares got sold and the chairman announced he’d not be going for re election that year which meant he was stepping down as chairman.

I’ll attach one of the last legal letters the co-op sent to my own solicitor

sold 6 weeks old AA heifer calves for 100 lately, got 120 for the AA bull calves of the same age on the same day in the mart. A complete disaster