I’ve just had the biggest belly laugh in months after reading Palamedia’s preliminary report for 2005.

Boy that chairman, CEO, company secretary and UTS Adjunct Professor of Accounting David Champtaloup can get a laugh from the toughest crowd. They managed to increase their revenue by $1 million, spent the last 2 years restructuring and still lost more money than last year – just over $2.1 million in fact. And read the commentary – it will have you in stitches.

The board must be giggling too – they managed to get the creditors to stump up an additional $1.2 million over the year and that most generous director John McNiven handed over an $800,000 loan. He’s just renewed the term for 13 months at his very reasonable 20% per annum.

They announced the attempt to sell their last asset – the magazine Insto. By my calculation they’ll need to get around $4 million for it – good luck. The net deficiency is $2.8 million plus $530,000 in intangibles, and the remainder of their premises lease before they pay any staff their redundancies – or aren’t they planning to pay any?

I’ll bet their creditors are looking closely at how they are travelling. Someone should, as most shareholders gave up years ago. Thanks to David Koch and Geoff Wilson for getting all this going – they’ve managed to kill over $30 million of shareholder funds.

Stephen Mayne writes:

Kochie walked away last year, so it’s a little unfair to continue blaming him for all that has gone wrong at Palamedia, although he was on the board and does still own 7%. But it certainly has been a dog as my $200 investment in 2000 is now only worth $4. The company never really recovered from the ill-fated takeover of Channel E at the height of the dotcom boom which Kerry Stokes and Channel Seven strongly encouraged.

Check out some of the earlier Palamedia debating on Crikey here and here. As you’ll see, Kochie and his former chairman David Champtaloup haven’t been backward in coming forward to explain their positions.