The big news is first that Barron's has almost resumed publishing tables showing net-asset values for closed-end funds, with a few gaps still. The other big news is that my account which was supposed to be moved on Friday to Interactive Brokers remains firmly lock up in E-trade Financial which will cease all non-US trading on July 9. I am now in week 9 of trying to move my account and the brokerage seems to be deliberately blocking the transfer by coming up with new excuses, the most recent saying that my margin account was in deficit. I do not have a margin account. The deficits incurred latterly totaling about $750 so far were the result of e-trade charging me "reorganization" fees for transferring many foreign holdings into pink sheet ADRs. Some however, remain stubbornly offshore because they have no ADRs, which means it will take longer than July 7 to move the whole account.

The brickwork has taken longer but even moving my brokerage account is something like the labors of Sisyphus or the negotiation of an Iranian nuclear deal--or perhaps just the talks about debt at the country where Sisyphus was invented, Greece. It is all supposed to be fully automated, and therein lies the rub. The last time I transferred accounts it took 72 hours. Now it is the 10th week with no end in sight.

Two Takeovers: Allana Potash, Portugal Telecom
There are two sales (actually takeovers) this week. One is at a modest discount of 18% from what we bought at, not too awful for a speculative stock in Ethiopian potash. It is Canadian, Allana Potash (ALLRF). The other, Portugal Telecom (PT) is a disaster of the first order from of all places, Portugal, the very country whose beaches I will hit between lecturing next month. Or to quote our son the certified financial analyst, "Portugal is Africa's last colony in Europe."

What happened here to an NYSE-listed American Depository Receipt is beyond belief. Our Lusitanian (the Roman name for Portugal) was sunk. The share was simply looted by all comers, starting with management which shipped its spare cash of about $1 bn to buy short-term commercial paper from a Luxembourg sub of the bank which underwrote Portugal Telecom's privatization, Banco Espirito Santo. The transfer was arranged by a member of the board representing the bank without the CEO knowing about it. The CEO, by the way, was himself African, Zainal Mohammed Bava, not exactly a member of the Portuguese ruling caste. Six weeks later the BES sub in Luxembourg could not repay and filed for "protection against its creditors". The Portugese BES parent was nationalized in distress to save depositors and the central bank from the impact of this, which would have been worse that what now faces Greece.

Failing to realize this was a set-up, I tallied the valuation of BES's Luxembourg holdings which include hotels, agricultural land, a travel agency, newspapers and websites, a chain of hospitals, and lots of other stuff which was put on the market in Portugal and Brazil. I figured we might get the proceeds. Big mistake. The proceeds went to the Portuguese oligarchs. Nobody made an attempt to repay the telephone company. Nobody went to jail. Nobody had to give up his mansion or private jet.

Instead, another Luxembourg entity bought the phone company via an outfit with ticker OIBR in Brazil to which PT owed money it no longer had. Patrick Drahi's Altice paid Oi  well below the book value of the remaining Portuguese assets, ~$8 bn when last reported. Drahi is a Moroccan-born French expatriate citizen. Oi refused to consider a counter-bid from the richest woman in Africa, Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the probably corrupt President of Angola, where PT had assets that were supposedly worth something.

Once Drahi got the deal PT had a name change, to Pharol. This opened the way to more Lusitanian looting, this time by the US brokerage and depositary community. A reorganization charge was imposed for the name change and another for the NYSE delisting. Finally another charge was imposed to cash out the poor former holders of PT ADRs. The result was to cut the payout per share to below half the amount Mr. Drahi had paid for the assets, eaten up in fees to the depositary (Deutsche Bank) and the DTC, and of course E-trade which collected every time any of this crossed "Go."

Ironically enough, the hotel where my Portuguese conference will be held, the Tivoli Almansor in Carvoeiro, was one of the assets sold by the BES sub in Luxembourg, and the proceeds also disappeared. The buyer was one Ellwood Heinecke of Thailand's Minor Group, another expat, this time from the USA. His father was CIA station chief in Bangkok and young Ellwood learned enough Thai to apply for Thai citizenship and excape US taxes. However he now is looking for a better bolthole, in Portugal. The Almansor is not the top Tivoli in Mr. Heinecke's new portfolio: that is the one at the Edward VII Square in Lisbon where I have stayed in the past.

I did advise selling 25% of our stake in what was then still PT at a loss in January of this year, after I could not rouse a class-action lawyer to take on the Oi sale terms either here or in Lisbon. ADR owners were kept from voting by the depository (Deutsche Bank) by the simple trick of not sending out the proxies until after the special shareholder meeting had already taken place. It's too bad Germans no longer understand Yiddish, because the fees hitting us on the remainder of our stakes are an example of outrageous chutzpah.

Other news. Deutsche Bank has form in charging fees for restructuring. I still own Infosys, the Indian IT firm, although it was sold from the model portfolio. INFY has an ADR on Nasdaq which just split its shares. But our dear German depository charged the ADR owners for issuing the new shares under the split.

A final note. No I am not overstating our gains on Galapagos and Bavarian Nordic. We sold half but we doubled up on these biotech earlier so they are fully weighted in both the sold positions table and the current one.

TM editors' note: This article discusses at least one penny stock and/or microcap. Such stocks are easily manipulated; do your own careful due diligence.