If anyone thought reality warping was confined to this week`s Woodstock 99 festival, then consider what a nightmare trip shareholders are having with Whetstone Industrial Holdings.
The company's money spinning visions for its "revolutionary" Olpex oil additive have turned into the kind of corporate circus that only our weird and wonderful venture capital sector could spawn.
Basically what has transpired in the last few weeks is that Whetstone announced a joint venture with Kwik Power International, a US-based biotechnology company, to distribute Olpex in North America.
According to the official press statement this deal would earn it an IMMEDIATE payment of $5 million - not to mention royalty income for 15 years and a NASDAQ listing for a new joint venture company, Power and Energy Technologies.
This week Whetstone announced that payments due from the Kwik Power deal, and a subsequent Nigerian transaction with a company called Range Mercantile, had been delayed.
This column has said it before and its worth repeating: venture capital companies have the tendency to announce big deals and then punctuate the actual delivery process with a variety of reasons for payment being delayed (Mouldmed take a bow!)
Peter Willig, who took the reins at Whetstone a fortnight ago from founder directors Justin Clohessy and Simon Fergusson, has got a job on his hands to correct this perception.
Foremost he needs to secure proceeds from the recent Olpex deals, and pronto too. Negotiations are ongoing with Willig indicating that a technicality in the joint venture's research and development arrangement was the minor stumbling block in the Kwik Power International deal.
We've never heard of Kwik Power International, which does not feature on any Internet search vehicles, and we're sure shareholders would have been happier if Whestone had struck the Olpex deal with a well known name in the energy industry - possibly of the calibre of Petronas or Shell.
Certainly blue chip energy companies would hardly be quibbling over technicalities when due date for payment has expired. Which brings me to another point in asking why, if Olpex is such a wonder product, didn't one of the energy industry multinationals make a concerted effort to acquire the rights to the additive?
What's also disturbing in Whetstone's case is that a R10 million payment due from the (out of Range?) Nigerian deal has already been accounted for in the interim report to end March. This despite the fact that Whetstone only announced the transaction with Range Mercantile last week and indicated in a press release that "details of this transaction are expected to be finalised in the next few weeks." Talk about counting your chickens...
I'm not sure if this means Whetstone won't reach its 13,5c a share forecast earnings in the year to end June, which I was led to believe would be mainly courtesy of Expressit, the company's courier business which now must be a prime candidate for unbundling or sale.
What I do know is that Willig told me a fortnight ago that Whetstone was experiencing cash flow problems, which would be alleviated by proceeds from the Kwik Power and Nigerian deals.
With the Olpex deals stalled Willig told me this week that Whetstone had alleviated its cash flow problem another way, although I was spared the details of this financial engineering.
But what really hacks me off is that in my endeavours over the last six weeks to deduce the cause of Whetstone's share collapse I was repeatedly reassured that nothing was fundamentally wrong at the company.
Mind boggling stuff indeed. Hopefully Willig's prescription is a dose of reality.