| [Forum] What about this? | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 03-May-2003 13:23 GMT by Amigan (Edited on 2003-05-03 16:30:31 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä) | 54 comments
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Here is another no payment, we must to know ALL THE TRUTH, not only that BBRV wants to say for his interest and bussines. If you don´t know, Bill Buck was the man behind VISCORP. Clik here
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| What about this? : Comment 31 of 54 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by bbrv on 06-May-2003 03:35 GMT | In reply to Comment 30 (Ferry):
OK Ferrán, we really do not have the time to do this right now, but you do not leave us much choice. We call you Sammy II now...
Buying Amiga Technologies was not the same as buying a few bananas. It was a bit more complicated. Here are some facts:
1. VisCorp prepaid $650,000 in an advance against royalties in January 1996 for the Amiga 3.1 license. We wanted Escom to credit this amount to the purchase price.
2. VisCorp and Escom were partners (Note: Manfred and I sat together at the CBM Bankruptcy hearing in NY in 1995. "We" were buying CBM. When we came to visit Escom, Manfred usually took us in his one of his Ferraris to dinner, meetings, etc. These are details long forgotten). We had already issued the VisCorp share certificate to Escom when the trouble started. They were to own 7% of VisCorp and become the European Distributor. The first purchase agreement between VisCorp and Escom was for $43 MILLION dollars. This agreement was signed and notarized. Everything was done. The AGREEMENT just had to be implemented. Most of the purchase price was to be covered by the value of the stock. The stock was trading actively above $10/share. Hundreds of thousands of shares were traded daily. The balance was to be covered by the sale of the inventory which included more than 50,000 A1200 (which were not selling well, BTW). VisCorp agreed to manage this process and take over the direction of Amiga Technologies.
3. Everything was all set. Then the Escom difficulties started to mount. First, Manfred Schmidt was accused of insider selling knowing that Escom had lost hundreds of millions in the Christmas 1995 season. Second, a group of seven banks that had huge loans to Escom began to put pressure on the Escom Board and forced Manfred out. Helmut Jost, formally CEO of CBM Germany and Escom Board member become the new Escom CEO. Things had to be re-check and verified by the Banks, but things still looked good.
4. Back in Chicago a couple of weeks later, Helmut Jost called us (the same night Germany won a World Cup Football match -- he was very happy). He told us not to come back the following week, Escom's bankruptcy had been determined. YIKES! What would we do??!! We were in trouble because everything we were doing was based on the AmigaOS, Escom and too many other things that now had to be reconciled. We waited anxiously for another couple of weeks (in the meanwhile the Amiga Community was going crazy!!! Some things do not change!)
5. Finally, Helmut said come over (Chicago to Frankfurt) ...at the airport -- on arrival -- we met Helmut and Dr. Hembach the Bankruptcy Trustee in a conference room at the Sheraton. He would honor the deal if we would. We said OK, but without Escom we would not be able to use the stock of VisCorp to make the purchase. We all agreed to think about. We met again the next day after meeting Helmut early to make a plan and spending half of the night on the telephone with the VisCorp Board in NY, Chicago, California, etc.). Helmut agreed to help us sell the inventory and we would drop the price to $30 million. We went to the meeting...now, picture this: Helmut and I (two guys with ego) walk into the conference room after Raquel (ladies first of course). Dr. Hembach liked Raquel and immediately stood up to welcome her. As they greeted each other Raquel told him we could not pay more than $20 million!!! Helmut and I were shocked (that was not the plan!), but even more surprised two seconds later when Hembach said OK and ask Raquel if she wanted coffee!!!
6. Then the work began. Where was everything? There was inventory in the UK, at the forwarder in Rotterdam, in Germany in five places and still millions of dollars of unpaid-for components and A1200s at the Selectron plant in Bordeaux, France (Ferrán, are you starting to understand how complicated this was...;-) ) Finally, Escom had licensed a group in China and there was still some mysterious inventory in the Phillipines that somehow the Chinese were getting without paying for it. To top it all off there was $3 million of Amiga chipset silicon in Philidelphia. Perhaps, one of the funniest moments in this odyessy was meeting former CBM lawyer Ed Goff and rolling one meter by one meter silicon waffers in a shopping cart from his car trunk to his office across Philidelphia city streets in traffic!
7. We started to make the due diligence. The IP had to be verified (there were hundreds of patents/patents pending all over the world), the inventory counted, etc., etc. There were simply too many things to recount here now...(maybe later).
8. In the meanwhile (see amiga-news interview referenced above), we made a deal with Hembach to keep Amiga operational and together (THERE WOULD BE NO AMIGA INC TODAY IF THIS WAS NOT DONE). After a couple of days we moved the meetings to the Kempinski Hotel outside of Frankfurt where we were staying. It took days to put the Agreement together...when it was done (again) it had to be implemented (we will have to write about this another time as we are running out of time now). As a first step we called Petro and he came to the Hotel. We charged 50,000 DM to our room (thanks to the Hotel Manager and Raquel's credit card) and handed Petro the cash. With this money he paid the first salaries of the new company the new Amiga Inc. Petro was happy and the rest is history....BTW, the name of Amiga at the time was Raquel Velasco GmbH!!!!
Anyway have to run for now, but are you starting to understand that off the cuff remarks without all the facts can be a bit shallow and misleading...;-)
More later,
Raquel and Bill |
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