Hey what's going on guys, Aaron here. Welcome to the video. So in this video I'm talking with Mike Cagney from Figure and also Tony V who is a creditor. In this video we're talking about what Figure's proposals are to get creditors liquidity, what needs to happen in order for all of us to get the most amount of money for our Ionic Digital shares, also the challenges that we have in front of us, the issues that we see with Ionic Digital and how Figure can help this process move along faster. So without further ado, here is the conversation with myself, Mike Cagney, and Tony. So guys, welcome. Tony, Mike, appreciate you guys coming on. Tony, you want to just chat about a little bit how we got here? And Mike, if you want to chime in, you guys can just kind of take it away. Maybe introduce yourselves a little bit as well.
I'm Tony V, a Celsius creditor. I was a part of the custody ad hoc, I was in the loans group, I was in it throughout basically this entire bankruptcy. It was a long process, it was very difficult for all of us involved. Pretty much, you know, we got to the finish line and we were hoping that things would get a little bit better as we got to the finish line. The Fahrenheit deal basically blew up. Most people didn't want the Fahrenheit deal anyway, but it was a means to an end. We could finally get out of bankruptcy, we could finally get some of our coins, and hopefully we can get a little bit more than that, right? But that didn't work out. And then the UCC basically crammed this mining co, Ionic, with US Bitcoin Group, which later merged with Hut 8. And they wanted to give the company, instead of 50 million like they were supposed to, they wanted to give it 225 million. So that's actually ended up being more than that because they gave them Bitcoin on top of it, so it's close to like 240, maybe 250, something along those lines. So creditors basically got screwed out of $200 million that the original wind down wasn't going to need, right? The wind down that we all voted for. But at that point we were kind of stuck. The judge, you know, approved everything. He didn't seem to, you know, he wanted to just be done, I think, kind of like everyone else. You know, we weren't happy about it. The borrowers, you know, objected to the changes in the plan. We thought it was material changes. They changed a whole bunch of stuff that they really hadn't thought out, you know, thoroughly enough. And we saw it, right? The corporate creditors got screwed, they had to go back into a mediation, they had to rework some of the math. The B got screwed, now someone's objecting to that as well. There's a whole bunch of, you know, stuff that happened, but it is what it is. We can't go back and change the bankruptcy. So myself and others, we were hoping that, you know, maybe this company can become a legitimate Bitcoin miner. I invest in Bitcoin miners, so I have, I would say, a pretty decent idea of, you know, how to value these types of companies. Right off the bat, 225 million is a lot of money, but at the same time you're looking at like very large scale infrastructure, right? These are data centers, Bitcoin mining equipment, they're very expensive but they have a short shelf life. And when Mashinsky bought these, he bought these at the peak of the market. And we're already, I think, three or four generations past these machines, so they're obsolete already. As Bitcoin price goes up, everyone tends to think that you're going to be more profitable and you're going to make more money because you're mining the same amount of Bitcoin. But the reality is the difficulty rate goes up, more and more people want to get into Bitcoin mining, and it just means you have a smaller piece of the pie. So the only way you can keep up with the hash rate, right? Because when we exited bankruptcy, I think it was like 220, the global hash rate. Now it's in the 700s. So we're looking at a 3x in difficulty just to mine the same amount of Bitcoin. So if your hash rate and your efficiency didn't go up 3x, you're now making less money than you were making before, even though Bitcoin price went up 2x, which is kind of where we're at now, right? Since then we haven't heard anything. I think it was like August, I started hearing rumblings that the CEO was either going to get fired or he was going to quit. I was starting to hear rumblings that the auditor quit. I was starting to hear that the board was just getting replaced left and right. And my first instinct was, there's no way, right? This is technically a publicly traded company, technically a publicly listed company, right? It's not traded publicly, but it is a public corporation. So they can't just do all these things and not, you know, notify their shareholders. So I wrote a letter to the judge. Then as I wrote the letter, more and more people started, you know, reaching out to me like, hey, by the way, this is what's going on. And these are just people that are in the mining industry that, you know, heard rumblings, they heard a rumor from a guy who, whatever, you know, type those types of deals. And then we started getting more communication from the company, or we started getting our first communication from the company, and it basically confirmed everything that I heard. And then I wrote a follow-up. And I'm not sure how I started, I teamed up with Mike, I think it was just a Twitter post, right? Something like that, like, hey Mike, you want to help us with this? And you're like, yeah, sure.
Well, we first started talking, and I apologize for everyone because I'm overcoming laryngitis, so, you know, my voice is a little more booming normally. But we first got engaged when we were bidding on the plan. And, you know, we had what we thought was a good proposal that involved a solution for the loan group, a fair solution for the earn group, involved contribution of Figure stock and other assets. And unfortunately, we weren't successful in that bid. And we didn't feel that the Fahrenheit proposal was a viable proposal. We told the UCC that. I think there was a misperception around the ability and speed to list on the NASDAQ and somehow that was going to provide liquidity for everyone. And when the Fahrenheit deal fell apart, you know, we thought initially that it would follow the plan, which was going into orderly wind down through Brick. And the UCC made the decision to pivot or to try to say that they had a plan that was substantially identical to the original Fahrenheit plan. We tried to reenter at that point and submit a new proposal. We were told very explicitly from Debtor Council that the Debtor still had exclusivity to the plan, our proposal wasn't welcome, and should we make our proposal public, we should be prepared to be sued. And so we backed off at that point, even though what we had, we thought, was a much better plan. And we were watching, you know, very closely the evolution as the company came out of bankruptcy at the end of January. At a particular date, June 1st, which was a liquidity provision, which was a commitment that the stock would be trading on either a national securities exchange or ATS by June 1st. And June 1st came and went and nothing happened. And so in August, the company dropped a press release that said, hey, we want to let you know everything's going on, awesome, we're great, we're killing it, and we no longer have a CEO, an auditor, a few board members left, and we skipped the liquidity provision. And so that's when we went out and said, look, and we'd experienced some pretty powerful aspects of crypto Twitter before this. So, you know, when FTX was auctioning off its discounted Solana through Galaxy, there were a lot of really pissed off creditors. And, you know, I put a tweet out on a Saturday and I said, look, if I get enough of you interested, I'll stand up a fund and I'll bid for you. And on Monday we had 535 IIAs and $235 million. And so it was demonstrative to me, excuse me, the power and mobility, but also how pissed off people were. And so we did the same thing here. We went out and said, look, there's a way to force a special board meeting, we think we can fix this, but there's a lot of things that need fixing, but we need shareholder support. And that's how we teamed up with Tony and really went to market.
Yeah, I think so many people, if not everybody, is just so confused at how we just got here. I mean, the whole bankruptcy process was, it was confusing. I mean, there were just so many different bidders and this is going to happen, then it pivoted to this. And then most people, if not, you know, all people, really don't want to be necessarily in a mining company right now. Much rather would have probably just gotten that liquidity and just invested it themselves. So here we are. I mean, this is what's happening like in the present moment. Where here, my guess is you're experiencing some pushback possibly from the Ionic board. Um, and just to, just to stop you and build on that point, remember when they came out of bankruptcy, Bitcoin was in the low 40,000, right? So it's been a real opportunity cost for folks being in the stock and not being in crypto. Absolutely. And Tony, what you said earlier about a misconception that people have that just because the price of Bitcoin is going up doesn't correlate one to one with the value of these shares that we supposedly got going up one to one, right?
Yeah, so a lot of Bitcoin mining investors are kind of figuring out the hard way right now what happens when a company gets big. In the past, you would see outsize returns if you were investing in these miners, and I'm talking about last cycle, right? Because they've only been around a little bit as far as being publicly traded. And last cycle, you can have a company that does a 20x, but that's because it was a $10 million, $20, $40 million company and it does a 20x. It does it for like two weeks, you know, and then the stock drops right away. So if you caught those two weeks, you made a boatload of money. Well, right now these companies are worth billions of dollars, right? The amount of liquidity you need to move a billion dollar company on the NASDAQ is way different than a $20 million company or a $10 million company. Once you factor in options, you got the market makers, rather, are just hedging themselves pretty much in every direction. It becomes very difficult to move these stocks. So if we had just gotten that 200 million or the 250, the full 250 in Bitcoin, we would have seen nearly a 2x right now, right? But instead we got a liquid stock that hasn't really moved. We haven't been able to sell it, even if we wanted to dump it for whatever pennies on the dollar. They're not allowing anyone to trade, and they gave us a valuation that isn't realistic. And if you were to dump it on the open market right now, you'd probably get below fair market value, right? Whatever the value of the assets are in the liquidation, if you were to dump those immediately without running like a full process and trying to get people involved, you would probably be looking at way below liquidation value. So we lost a ton of money.
Yeah, so just to speed up to the present, what are the major obstacles right now that you guys are seeing to get liquidity? Maybe if you want to talk about what Ionic is saying is their solution and how they supposedly want to solve this problem, and then what do you think is the actual best solution to, you know, get liquidity? Because I think that is the most important thing for people is the ability to sell if they want to sell and, like you've talked about, have enough backing, which I hope you talk about as well, have enough investors so the price doesn't just death spiral down. So I know I just laid out a lot of stuff, but feel free to just dive in to whatever.
Yeah, so I think there's two parts to this. There's the initial liquidity part and there's the subsequent capital you need to create a viable enterprise that whether it ultimately gets sold or continues to operate independently, it's going to need incremental capital. And so starting with the first part, the board has a mistaken notion that somehow they list on the NASDAQ, the 86,000 shareholders, of which I would guess two-thirds are going to want to sell immediately, right? That might even be conservative in terms of what that number is. There isn't money to buy that. And in particular, to list on the NASDAQ or national securities exchange, you need at least two market makers. No market maker is going to sign up to make a two-way market in front of that. It's like catching a falling knife because all it is is going to be sell orders on day one. And so the company has to find a way to effectively get those folks out at a fair price that could then turn on trading in a way that the first order isn't an avalanche of sells. And the challenge with that is to get that capital to come in to go out into the market and go to whether it's private equity, whether it's venture, whether it's strategic, you got to have a story. And the problem is there is no story about Ionic right now. The story with Ionic is, you know, as one of the board members called it, it's a dumpster fire, right? That was a board member's comment, not my comment. And so it's going to be really hard to go out and get that capital without some substantive changes in the business. You need to change the board, you need to get a CEO in, you need to get a real strategy in terms of what the business is trying to do instead of lip service about, oh yeah, you know, we can switch to AI when it makes sense. You need a real mining operation group, not a competitor running your mining operations, right? I mean, that's one of the craziest things that they did. And so the first thing is get that capital so that people that want liquidity on day one can get out and they get out at a price that is a fair price to them, not cash value, not below cash value, but something that's reflective of that story. Then you can turn on liquidity. And what we're advocating is we're saying, look, we have an alternative trading system, we can list the stock. We don't have to go through a Form 10 process, there's no S-1 process. We can list the stock immediately. Obviously, we'd want to clear out those sellers first, but then we would bring in market makers, we would provide a bid into that stock, and we would provide a story. And we would do a second round of capital, effectively a PIPE, that would get the company sufficiently capitalized to upgrade its rigs, upgrade its infrastructure, and be able to go out and tell a story to the market, whether as a standalone business or as a potential acquisition. Because a lot of mining right now is subscale, and so there is a consolidation aspect that makes sense as it relates to this. But to be able to tell a story, and the story needs to be more than mining, more than AI, those are table stakes. Needs to be things like helping facilitate a decentralized pool operator, for example, something the mining industry desperately needs. Helping to stand up a carbon credit marketplace, something that Ionic's uniquely positioned to do given its energy contracts. There's story, there's things that you could do to build a narrative that would get people excited about this and want them to put capital in. And the folks that want to stay in should stay in, but they should stay in as something that's not going to be driven into zero. What I really worry about is now the company's talking about an S-1 instead of the Form 10. And the 1145, one of the most magical things about coming out of bankruptcy, bankruptcy sucks, everyone experienced how much it sucks through this whole process, but it allows a company to emerge through what's called 1145. And 1145 means you can create public equity without any national registration. And it's a very powerful thing. And that's what Ionic did. They have public equity right now. It's not trading on a public exchange, but that equity is public. And now they're talking about, well, we're going to backtrack and do an S-1. Well, kind of ironic that an S-1 requires two years of audited financials and this company can't produce one, right? This is going to push any public event into 2026. Why is a company so afraid of giving shareholders liquidity? Like they won't even let people trade on the private market right now. Part of, you know, there was a White & Case lawyer that told me the reason they're doing that, they're afraid I'm going to accumulate a ton of shares and take control of the business. And I might do that, but it's ridiculous to block people from liquidity. You forced 86,000 people into this thing, you caused them a massive opportunity cost of missing out on the crypto rally that's happened, and you're giving them no visibility as to when they can get cash back. And in fact, you're setting it up for a death spiral, which is you want to list it with no bid capital there against what will probably be 60, 70,000 people wanting to get the hell out and sell, and you're going to crash this thing to zero. And it's just the naivete of the board, and it goes into a lot of these board members have never been on a public board, they don't understand public markets, they've never raised capital, and these are all things that are necessary for this business. Why are those board members there? Why aren't real people there that can actually solve these problems? And the shareholders deserve answers to those questions, and the company isn't forthcoming with that.
So the biggest problem with Ionic, you know, I agree with everything Mike said, but the number one problem with Ionic is they don't have the people that can do any of the things that Mike said. I worked with Figure during the bankruptcy, I was part of the loans group, like I said, you know, they were helping us to refinance people's loans. But Mike, what do you have, like three billion dollar corporations that you've built now? Four? I don't know what the number is, but you have...
I'm on my fourth, but I've done three so far. I've raised billions of dollars of capital.
Exactly. So you're on number four. These guys are on number zero, right? They're going to go the opposite direction of the way that you typically like to go, right? The way everyone wants to go. So they don't have a track record to be able to pull any of this off. So one of the things I like about Figure, you know, the Provenance blockchain that they have allows us to do distributions in kind, right, through Bitcoin. That'll save people a ton of money on taxes because if you get cash, that's a cash distribution, that's a capital gain. If you get Bitcoin, you can offset some of your losses from bankruptcy. I'm not a tax attorney, don't take tax advice, right? Talk to your CPA, but that's how I view it for my personal situation. Figure is able to raise that capital. They have the network of people that are willing to invest in someone like Mike Cagney because he's done it before. How many investors are willing to put their money into Manny Ido, right? How many people are going to put their money into Scott Duffy, Tom DeFi, the UCC members? Nobody. Nobody's going to do that. It's going to go in the opposite direction, right? You know, that's one of the biggest issues. They don't know what they don't know. They haven't done this before. They don't know what to expect, and it shows in the performance. They haven't foreseen any of the issues because they've never done it before.
And Aaron, I think it's an important point to bring up because there's a lot of discussion on Twitter about, am I doing this because I want to take over Ionic? Do I want to pillage Ionic? Do I want to steal all the Bitcoin out of Ionic? I don't want to run or control Ionic, right? I'd like us to have a board seat of seven or nine or whatever that is, so we have a seat at the table. I'll go out and raise the capital and I'll take the burden on that. I'm not asking them to pay me normal banker fees to do that. I'll do it for free. I'll go out and raise the capital, I'll get liquidity into this, but I can't do that unless the remaining board and the team there is someone I can get behind and support in terms of being able to turn this around. And so all I'm advocating for is change at the board, getting the right management in place. I don't want to control it, I don't want to run it. I'd like a seat at the table because we're going to be integral in terms of going out to raise capital, and I think it's going to be important that we have that seat so the market looks at us credibly as raising capital, not as a broker or an agent, but someone who's involved and has skin in the game. But at the end of the day, honestly, when we started this process, it's the first bankruptcy I've ever been involved in. I was mortified by just how bad the process was. And, you know, I would call it graft, I would call it corrupt. You know, White & Case threatens to sue me when I say that stuff, but that's how I feel. And at the end of the day, at this point, I have a lot of sympathy for the shareholders that got jammed into this. And there's a path for them to get liquidity and a path for them to get whole. And I hope that they keep some of it in Ionic because I think with the right team, it could return real capital to folks. But I totally appreciate the opportunity cost of not being in the market right now. And, you know, at the end of the day, I just want to get people liquidity.
Yeah, I just want to bring up something which you did kind of cover, but I think there are some people that don't want another Mashinsky-like thing to happen. What I mean by that is, like, you've been in business for a long time, you're incredibly successful and respected. Some people may believe, like, is this just a quote hostile takeover? You know, that word gets thrown around. Like, are you just, what's in it for you? What's going on here? Why are you putting so much effort into this? You did kind of touch on that, but do you mind just kind of giving a quick overview of that rebuttal to that statement?
Sure, sure. And I think it's an important discussion point to have, and I've been very transparent about our motivations on this. So, you know, I'll start with the fact that we've had thousands of shareholders who have signed up for support for this board meeting and this change. And, you know, we're in a position that we can agitate for that change, although they have to run a board meeting by February anyway because of Delaware law. So, you know, whether we're able to force that or it happens irrespective, the board meeting will happen. My motivation on this is twofold. And that one, Ionic is in a unique situation to be a public equity native on blockchain. And I think this is incredibly powerful. And it's the beginning of what a lot of people who got into Celsius, why they got into Celsius, because this idea of DeFi and the democratization of financial services, that can't happen if we're just living in crypto, right? We have to get public equity on chain, we have to get fixed income on chain, etc. And you got to be able to take that public equity, your Ionic shares for example, and use it as collateral to buy Bitcoin. And you got to be able to take your Bitcoin and use as collateral to buy Ionic. And so my motivation is I want to build an exchange for everything. I want to build an exchange not just for crypto, not just for equity, but for any kind of asset class. And this is a unique situation, along with my own cap table, which I'm also putting on Provenance. And so, you know, it's unique in the way that it's massively value creative. And this is why, you know, we think we gave a much better proposal in the auction process than Fahrenheit did. And unfortunately, you know, the guidance that the UCC got from Perella, I think, was poor and misguided and probably conflicted based on what happened coming out of that auction process. But, you know, that's a huge value to us. And that's why when I'm looking at leaning in on here, I don't need to get paid to go out and raise the capital. I don't need to get paid for whatever else that we're doing. And I certainly don't want to go and raid the piggy bank of Ionic. I want to take all their excess Bitcoin and dividend it back to the shareholders before we provide liquidity for folks in terms of the transaction. But there is value to us, and, you know, that value is getting the first public equity on chain. And I'd like people to be able to participate in that. And, you know, we certainly work through ways to give Figure Markets exposure to Ionic shareholders, and we'll continue to explore ways to make that happen.
So one of the things there, right? So everything you just heard from Mike, that's a founder. That's a founder of a company. They're not looking for a paycheck, they're not trying to do whatever. They want to grow the company, they want to make it successful. What we have currently at Ionic is you have these board members that are making $450,000 each, right? This is a startup. This is a startup company, and they're electing to get majority cash compensation, right? If you're confident in your abilities to make a good company, you're not taking cash, you're taking equity, because you know that equity is going to go up. Why would you take cash instead of equity? Because you think the equity is not worth anything. And they're just telling you just by their own actions. Don't forget about what they say. They say we're laser focused, they say we're best in class, all these things that means nothing. Look at their actions. They're all electing to take cash. They're taking the minimum amount of equity they can and taking cash for the rest. And if they thought it was valuable, they would never do that.
There's a couple of good data points on that. I mean, one is nobody at Figure Markets makes $450,000. So we all make, and in fact, my salary at Figure Markets is $1, right? I work for equity, and because I believe in it, and that's what I want to pull out. If you take the Ionic board comp with their emergence committee, right, which is now going to, if they try to go down this S-1 process, last another two years in this emergence committee, I think we ran the numbers and I believe it was something like they're ranked 489 out of the S&P 500 ranked top of board compensation. There are 488 boards whose compensation is below what these folks are paying themselves, including their emergence committee compensation. And, you know, they're getting predominantly paid in cash, which is what I would consider a bad alignment.
So here's an interesting fact, right? So let me just pull this up. This is a company that didn't have an auditor up until like a couple weeks ago. They have an audit committee that pays $7,500 to be on the committee, right? They don't have an auditor. They should have every single person, all hands on deck, should be on the audit committee working seven days a week to fix that problem. Their compensation for the committee is 7,500 bucks. Their compensation to be on the emergence committee is $180,000 cash, right? That doesn't even make sense. This company emerged out of bankruptcy back in January. So what exactly are you doing? Because if you look on their website, the emergence committee doesn't have bylaws. They put up the bylaws for the other committees, but the emergence committee doesn't seem to have those up, right? Have they had any meetings? What exactly are they meeting? What are they discussing, right? Hey, did we emerge? Yes. All right, see you guys later, collect your paycheck and go. So yeah, it seems like there's a lot of looting happening and there really isn't any, since we're out of bankruptcy, there's nobody that can really, there's no checks and balances at this point either, right? There's nobody that can really stop what's happening except possibly Figure coming in and forcing some changes. Is that kind of how it feels?
Well, the shareholders can. And the issue is the shareholders have to have a voice, and they haven't been given one yet. And so, you know, Ionic, a Delaware company, it has to adhere to Delaware law. There's a process that we'll go through to force the shareholders to be heard. It's unfortunate that we have to force that. It's unfortunate the company isn't reactive to its shareholders. But there's a process that will happen. And, you know, will they do it willingly? And I hope they do. I hope they have a change of heart and they want to lean in and work with us and solve the liquidity problem and solve the PIPE capital that they need and really establish a strategic direction. You know, we're not dogmatic in terms of what has to happen here versus getting people liquidity and then, you know, those that stay in giving them value and liquidity. But, you know, if the board continues to fight, there's a process. And it's a process through Delaware courts. It's not a cheap process. It's something that Figure is willing to pay for. We're well funded and can lean in to do it. And, you know, we're going to see this to the end. We're not going to back out of this one.
It's supposed to be the board that monitors all this stuff, but unfortunately in this situation, they're probably the number one cause of all the, I don't want to say corruption, but wrongdoings, let's say.
So just to kind of sum up a little bit, it seems like there is hope for Ionic, but there needs to be a new story in order to get liquidity, in order to get funding from outside investors. And from your understanding and from your decades of experience, there have to be some changes in order to get that outside funding, in order to get liquidity so we don't death spiral when people are able to sell. That's very important. After that, there's some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, right? All those types of details about will they just give all that Bitcoin back to us, is that going to stay in the company, I mean, that's all kind of TBD, to be determined. But first things first, we have to kind of start, like, change the board up, get a new story. What's next? You know, what do we need to do next in order to get things moving is kind of a better question for you guys.
So we're actively soliciting shareholder support, and the more shareholder support we have, the more leverage that we have with the company in terms of pushing for change. We are in dialogue with the company and with the board to try to push for change, although, you know, thus far, I wouldn't describe those conversations as fruitful or constructive yet. But at least they've started, right? And hopefully they continue. But I think the biggest thing is for shareholders to make sure their voices are heard, right? It's their money, it's their upside, it's their situation. Pledge your shares for support. When I say pledge your shares, you're not actually giving us your shares or doing anything. You're just saying, look, we support you to call the special board meeting and have a public forum of which, you know, the board members have to act on as a fiduciary responsible agent. The problem we have right now is it's very difficult to tell they're acting in a fiduciary responsible way because they won't disclose anything. We can't see a balance sheet. We get sporadic elements of an income statement that are generally taken significantly out of context or out of date. There's no way for us to understand what's actually going on other than we can see how much Bitcoin is being mined because it's in the wallets. We can see the wallets and we've seen it move around for potential transactions. We know what the energy cost was coming out of bankruptcy and some of the issues around that. Based on energy cost, based on rig age, and based on Bitcoin being produced, you know, I don't think that they're making any money right now. I think they're losing a lot of money. And I don't think they're in a position to raise more capital to upgrade that fleet. And so, you know, I think they're going to head right into a wall if they don't make some substantive changes.
It just goes back to the people involved, right? They don't have the expertise to turn the ship around. When we met with the board, Manny Ido didn't even turn on his camera, you know, they're on Zoom. One of the attorneys from White & Case looked like he was falling asleep during the meeting. Liz Lauma, the chairman, we asked her very simple questions, what's your EBITDA? She had no idea, right? What's the global hash rate right now? She had no idea. She just kind of smirked, smiled, whatever, but you can tell she didn't know. It's not a serious operation right now. These aren't serious people that can really turn this thing around. And to caveat, whether she didn't know or she didn't want to tell us, we just didn't get an answer, right? We asked some pretty basic questions and we didn't get any answers. And these are questions that should not be, like, not shared. Like, there's no reason why they shouldn't share these answers. If you're eight, nine months in as a shareholder of a public company and no one's told you what an EBITDA number was, that's unheard of.
Yeah, EBITDA is like that magic number where you can twist everything to kind of make it look better than it actually is. And if it doesn't look good and you don't want to disclose it, then there's a big problem.
Well, that's the other issue is, you know, EBITDA, especially in a situation where you have the aging of these rigs, taking out depreciation doesn't make any sense. And depreciation is an actual real expense. And what you'd like to look at is actual cash flow and forward capex. I mean, there's some basic things that would tell you the health of the business, and it's just right now none of that's disclosed.
Why wouldn't they be disclosing? Do you think it's just that bad or do you think they have ulterior motives here?
It's a great question. I would say that if they were knocking the ball out of the park, they'd be producing financials. I think the fact that their auditor resigned, what, eight months into it, you know, wouldn't give me warm and fuzzies.
