ebitda currently compared to covenants of the bond, he lost me at this point to be honest but it seemed to be basically that the bonds have guarantees of how the business will perform and there will need to be an improvement to achieve that. apparently failing on any one of those would not be a minor issue.
Gone over this with him again as I didn't really get it first time round. Seems the way it works is that the bond has certain things guaranteed, so that the investors know their money is safe, and if they don't meet those conditions they've defaulted and in that scenario the bond owners have a claim to what was put up as security. The security is the arena lease and ACL.
There's two interesting guarantees. Firstly that valuation of the arena and shares does not drop below 1.4 times the total debt of Wasps - that's all companies in the group combined. I've always had my doubts about the valuation and now knowing the valuation has to remain high does nothing to ease those doubts. The debt is £34.6m so that would mean the valuation and shares can't drop below £48.4m. The shares are valued at £9.7m so that means the valuation of the arena can't drop below £38.7m. And of course it means taking out any more debt, lets say to build houses or a training ground, would be an issue.
Secondly the ebitda from June 2017 onwards must be 1.5 times the groups finance costs. Ebitda before tax, interest payments and similar. The ebitda from this set of accounts is a £2.2m loss. Finance costs were £3.1m in these accounts so using that figure by June 2017 they need to turn a £2.2m loss into a £4.7m profit, that's a turnaround of £6.9m by June - seems a pretty tough task to me.
He asked an interesting question to which I don't know the answer. Do either CCC or SISU own a big chunk of the bonds?