Following is a transcript of the audio interview we conducted on Wednesday 1st September 2010 with Robert Ware, CEO, and Preston Rabl, Corporate Director, of Conygar Investment Company PLC (LON:CIC) .
Q. We’re sitting here today with Robert Ware, Chief Executive of Conygar and Preston Rabl, thank you for seeing us here today. We’re going to ask a few questions about the business. So if you could give us a short introduction to Conygar’s background and your general investment strategy we’d really appreciate it.
RW Thank you. We set up Conygar in September 2003, three of us - myself, Peter Batchelor and Steven Vaughn, all of us were former executives of MEPC. MEPC was the fourth largest property company by capitalisation and with funding from GE and Hermes we took it private in June 2000 for £3.8bn. That was highly successful. We’re told that the GE Team still says its one of the most successful real estate deals they’ve done in the world. We were all paid out and left MEPC in the summer of 2003 and decided to do various things, one of which was to set up Conygar as a small cash shell to see what we could do with it. So that’s the basis of it.
We’ve now had various fundraisings, the whole company is obviously much larger, and our significant shareholders today are Fidelity, Black Rock, Aviva, Legal and General and the management; they account for just sub 50% of the business.
Our strategy in general investment thesis has really been the same in that we’re very, very opportunistic. We believe that we’ve got the skills that we’ve obtained through MEPC and prior to that a company called Clayform, which is now called Development Securities, in all fields of the business other than that we don’t build houses; my wife will tell you I can’t actually put an extension on the end of the house so we’re not going to build anything in the housing front. Although our projects do have a focus on obtaining planning permission for housing, which we will then, obviously, hand over or sell or involve ourselves in partnership with house builders going forward.
Q. Okay, you’ve made two major acquisitions in the last couple of years, Lamont and the Advantage Property Income…
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