A new form of “backdating”?
Rather than paper your walls with the stock of plummeting companies such as Ford, Merrill Lynch, and others, a Caribbean hotelier is offering investors a much better offer: a chance to swap their sinking stocks for beach vacations, with the shares’ value rolled back to July 1, 2008 pre-meltdown levels.
Elite Island Resorts president Steven Heydt said Monday that “traditional methods of doing business are obviously not taking us where we need to go as an economy. So I decided that instead of selling travel at a cash price, I would sell travel by changing the currency.”
According to an article in the New Zealand Herald, the deal works as follows:
Say you’re holding a bunch of American Express stock, currently $20 a share. For booking purposes, Elite will value it at $40, its level on July 1, so transferring 111 shares plus $5 cash gets you an all-inclusive weeklong stay worth $4,445.
Approximately 100 US stocks, from Ford Motor Co. to Xerox Corp., are included in the deal, which attracted more than 250,000 hits to the company’s website through Monday.
