Polemos rears into life with second placing in as many months

Polemos, a 'sleeping minnow' which has remained a virtually inactive cash shell since it sold the PLUS Markets exchange business four years ago, has reared into life in recent months and has now confirmed completion of a £175,000 fundraising and the appointment of Peterhouse as a new joint broker.

Alongside the £80,000 raised in February by broker Beaumont Cornish the new placing is likely to have come as somewhat of a surprise to shareholders, who have seen the company's cash, which peaked after it raised £650,000 in June 2014, dwindle to £207,000 by the end of 2015, a year in which directors neither made nor disposed of any investments.

The two new placings have both been made at a price of 0.04p per share and, Polemos said, will be used to assist in seeking investment opportunities.

In 2015, the £117,000 opening balance of investments lost £66,000 in value over the year to close out the year at £51,000 as the company held on to its sinking investments.

The last reported investments made by Polemos were in May 2013, when it splashed out £0.6m in Tullow Oil, Ophir Energy and Pura Vida Energy.

Since then the board of directors, which is formed of executive chairman Hamish Harris and non-executive directors Jason Berry and Spencer Wilson, have seemingly been very patient, as has a shareholder base that is led by serial small company backer Bruce Rowan, as the shares fell from 0.5p at the time of the PLUS sale to as low as 0.039p in December.

The stock phrase used in the last few sets of results is that the company "continues to review a number of potential new investment opportunities in accordance with its investing policy and further announcements will be made in due course as appropriate".

In June 2012 PLUS Markets became Polemos, two years before the foundation of the Podemos Spanish left-wing political party, after the disposal of its equities exchange to Icap for £500,000 and its other businesses for nominal sums and deferred considerations in a strategic scheme it dubbed "Project Chardonnay".

David Lenigas was appointed as executive chairman of the company and Donald Strang moved to the role of finance director. Lenigas stepped down in August 2014, with Strang replacing him. That year Polemos lost £258,000 purely on admin expenses, leaving cash and equivalents of £342,000.

Strang left at the start of 2016, with Harris presiding over results for 2015 that showed cash had dwindled to £207,000 after losses of £149,000, again purely expenses such as adviser fees and directors salaries.

Polemos boasted that it had reduced the loss through "careful cost management" throughout the year and was happily able to point to just £42,000 in the three directors' salaries last year, down from £160,000 in 2014.

Each of the directors, with the exception of Berry, so far, hold fully vested options over 8m ordinary shares each exercisable at 0.2p each up until 31 December 2020, amounting to 32m options.

Polemos shares, which leapt on Tuesday morning ahead of the placing, were up 23% at 0.055p an hour before the close.