MIF in Successful Secondary Offering

by Alan Ginsberg

To repeat the immortal words of Yogi Berra, our acknowledged American master of malapropisms, “It’s deja vu all over again.” How better to describe the recently completed $70,000,000 share offering by MIF Limited, the Tsakos-controlled, thinly traded, Oslo sharelisted company.

We do not choose our words lightly. While Tsakos Shipping & Trading S.A. (hereafter “TST”) owns only 23% of the approximate 4.1 million shares previously outstanding, TST exerts complete commercial, technical and financial control over the day-to-day operations of MIF. Simply stated, MIF has no employees. Absolute Navigation Ltd., (hereafter “Absolute”) the single purpose company “managing MIF affairs” also has no employees, having in turn “employed the technical management services of TST for all day-to-day aspects of vessel operations.” To be sure, these relationships are fully disclosed. What miffs us (and we do apologize for any puns) is the antiquated notion of management either adding no intrinsic value or at best only being for rent. For those with short institutional memories, we need only to query the management of Teekay Shipping Corporation, whose initial attempt for a public sharelisting failed in part on this issue. The fact that this is a secondary offering does not impact our views.

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