I find the shareholders story a little surprising - as a shareholder who goes to the S4A meetings, the general consensus was to keep our shares. Under business acquisition and shareholdings regulations, should Mr. Lai get 90% of the shareholdings of the club, there would be a mandatory sale of all other shares to him, at the same per-share value he purchased 88% of them from Peace. This would mean that everyone would get the £15,000+ they'd be worth. The vast majority of people I know through S4A bought the shares for sentimental value and the comments of some of the higher ups in that article I find a little unfair - there had been mentions of protecting investments but not to the scale that they seem to be expressing in the article.
In fact for many years S4A's primary aim was to give the smaller shareholders the opportunity to group together and communicate properly in order to PREVENT the mandatory sale of our shares to Peace, and I witness people sell shares within the groups so that those who wanted to cash in could sell to another small shareholder and not lose the shares to Peace or others - so to do a complete U-turn and complain we're not being offered anything is a little contradictory. Very confused as to how there's been a sudden flip-flop.
