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.
Read the New Zealand Herald article
