Digital 9 Infrastructure has paid off £273.5m in debt ahead of a shareholder meeting today that will decide the company’s future.
In a stock exchange notice today, the investment trust said the cash had been used to pay back its debts, which stood at £347m at the end of January.
The cash to pay off its debts came from the approval of the sale of the trust’s ‘crown jewel’ Verne Global this month, which the Icelandic regulatory body had blocked due to anti-trust concerns.
After it announced it would pursue a wind-down earlier this year, it has been waiting to see how its shareholders will vote at today’s extraordinary meeting on whether to shutter the trust or not.
As part of preparing to shutter, Digital 9 said today it had told its investment manager, Triple Point, that it would be terminating its investment management agreement with the firm, which will come into effect in March next year.
The trust said it would be exploring a range of options, such as staying with Triple Point for a cheaper fee, finding a new investment manager or becoming self-managed.
While the board had been expecting a proposal from non-executive directors Brett Miller and Richard Boléat around the self-management option, they revealed today that the two would be resigning immediately.
Numis analyst Colette Ord said the news that the board members were standing down “comes as a surprise to us, given they were only appointed in December 2023”.
Ord added that after the shareholder vote today, the “next key event” will be the release of the trust’s 2023 results. However, she noted that the board has already said its valuation on paper was unlikely to reflect how much it will actually be able to get for selling off its assets.
The trust’s share price has fallen 68.3 per cent over the last year, and currently sits on a 78.2 per cent discount.
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