BREAKING: Another £70m AIM disaster as ETX announces plans to delist as it completes £28.9 million fund raise

AIM can brush off shitty little companies with no cash delisting as being a merely cyclical episode of bear market blues. However, following news that £70 million RedX Pharma (REDX) was to delist and go private there is another bombshell today. ETX Therapeutics (ETX) has announced that it is raising £28.9 million at 15p, a premium of 2.5p to last night’s close but that is conditional on it delisting too.

e-Therapeutics (#ETX) – £22.5m equity raise at 24p per share, including £0.9m via PrimaryBid

E-Therapeutics: having bagged shares from sale of Searchbolt, CEO quits

Tom Winnifrith described the deal under which AIM-listed E-Therapeutics (ETX) repurchased a company called Searchbolt (having spun it off some while back) as stinking like a pile of rotting kippers at the height of summer. In the event, two directors of E-Therapeutics ended up with (between them) almost 3.4 million shares in the company from the transaction. Now the CEO (who accounted for 3,350,228 of those shares – plus a cash sum to cover capital gains tax) has quit with immediate effect.

e-Therapeutics - more on that transaction to re-buy Searchbolt: were the rotting kippers stuffed with rotting pickled anchovies?

Tom Winnifrith has already stuck the knife into e-Therapeutics (ETX) over its related party deal to re-buy Searchbolt – a company it had previously spun off as non-core (see HERE). Noting the lack of recent accounts, following an extension of its accounting period, there have been no numbers since the period ending July 2014 – figures which were filed very late (14 months post period), and which showed net current assets of MINUS £12,615 and net assets of MINUS £166,078 and £831,528 of losses had been racked up over about seven years (with about £45,000 during the year to July 2014).

ETX Therapeutics (#ETX) Utterly ludicrous joke related party deal - more later but RED FLAG AHOY

e-Therapeutics (#ETX) - Changes broker and Nomad

Insider dealing at e-Therapeutics – let’s see if AIM Regulation and the FCA are awake today

e-Therapeutics (ETX) has just issued this statement about the >35% jump in its share price in the last few days. In short, its board has admitted that it thinks price sensitive information has leaked from the company. “Big deal”, I hear our regular readers cry, “this is what we expect on AIM”. Sadly I have to agree with this sentiment, but this instance of seemingly clear-cut insider dealing has caught my eye. This is because, on this occasion, the London Stock Exchange’s AIM Regulation team and Financial Conduct Authority should have an easy time of catching the culprit or culprits. That is, if they are awake. It is, after all, Thursday afternoon.