Company might salvage the shareholders meeting

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. reported promising news this month for its shareholders: a deal with Great Britain to raise a sunken ship that may contain millions of dollars in centuries-old coins.

Now the Tampa company is promising to revive a long-buried tradition: the annual shareholders meeting, its first in five years.

Odyssey's 1997 bylaws call for a shareholders meeting at least once every 13 months. Reports filed with securities regulators have routinely suggested such a meeting was imminent.

But chairman and chief executive John Morris says that for fledgling, lightly traded companies like Odyssey, annual meetings are worse than useless. Morris, vice president Greg Stemm and St. Petersburg investor Jim MacDougald alone accounted for 53.2 percent of all shares outstanding as of May 15, enough to make decisions without consulting other shareholders. Still laying the groundwork for its first shipwreck recovery, Odyssey had revenues totaling just $9,975 in the fiscal year ended Feb. 28.

"Would you as a shareholder want me to take $50,000 of the very limited capital we have to hold a shareholder meeting, which wouldn't have any impact because there's a group of people who can make the decisions anyway?" he asks. "We as management have decided that it's more prudent to save our money than to hold a show, an artificial meeting."

Since the last shareholders meeting in September 1997, a half dozen of the company's largest shareholders have awarded stock options to Morris and Stemm, appointed or removed directors, and taken $3-million cash from MacDougald in exchange for a nearly 40 percent share of the company's stock. After-the-fact SEC filings alert shareholders to the decisions.

Stemm says Odyssey intends to move its stock from the bulletin board to one of the major exchanges, all of which require annual meetings. That's why, Stemm says, Odyssey will finally hold one Nov. 25.

Maybe that will generate more interest in the company's stock. Since it announced the British pact, Odyssey's shares have traded heavily but fallen in price. The stock closed Friday at $1.34, up 17 cents.

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