Today is a busy Monday what with more press scandales now affecting Libérationin the wake of earlier ones at The New York Times and Le Monde. It is a change from the focus on Murdoch's right-leaning empire over The News of the World's hacking. These days the liberal press is the subject.

But surely a Jewish lady like Jill Abramson could not have had the a Times' logo tattooed on her back? Except when they are in a concentration camp without a choice, Jews do not get tattoos. Lucy Kellaway in today's Financial Times writes that Ms Abramson has a crimson H for Harvard and a black Gothic print T for The Times on her back. (The FT is not a journal of record. Today's issue says on page 1 that there is an article on page 2 about a controversial Mass Pope Francis plans to hold at the alleged site of the Last Supper—but the article isn't there.)

India is now being over-weighted by enthusiastic investors worldwide. We strike a few notes of caution for our paid subscribers below. My main concern is that the new masters in New Delhi keep the excellent central bank governor Raguram Rajan in place and not put one of their minions at the head of the CB, the Reserve Bank of India. He can assure global investors of a steady rupee and fighting inflation.

The multinational merger mania continues apace with a new higher Pfizer bid for Astra Zeneca of Britain, based in part of tax benefits to PFE, and AT&T shifting its global assets to better its chances with its bid for NexTV. From Mexico City, Eduardo Garcia writes in senditoncomun.co.mx (now available also in English) that the T deal will hurt Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim because it will sell its stock in America Latina to win regulatory approval for buying NexTV which operates in Latin America.

We report on some smaller but significant moves in Brazil, Israel, Ethiopia and Egypt for our paid subscribers, along with goodies from other exotic places in Africa, India, Mongolia, and Russia. Plus a report on a company looking good which could do even better. Plus another hoard of news from our risky but fun holdings on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) along with small caps from Canada and news from Holland, Brazil, Singapore, Britain and Finland.

*Compugen, the Israeli IT drug search firm reported on its Q1 which beat and boasted about its immuno-oncology pipeline, greater US presence, and enhanced financial resources which are also looking good. CGEN sales hit $2.1 mn in Q1 vs a mere $162,000 in Q1 2013 thanks to upfront payments from Bayer Pharma AG under its licensing deal last summer. Heftier R&D spending and stock compensation to its staffers cost $4.157 mn in Q1 vs $3.375 mn a year earlier; it may be time for CGEN, after an insider trading scandal which took out its CFO over the Bayer deal to pay its staff with shekels rather than stock. The bottom line produced a loss of $1.9 mn vs a loss of $3.4 mn the year before. CGEN closed the quarter with cash and on-hand R&D funding of $14.1 mn, up $900,000 from the close of 2013, part from the March issue of new shares raising $68 mn. The time has come for a new direction on management under a new CFO, in my opinion.

*Israel Chemicals (ISCHF, sold) is going to have to change its name. Its top brass is moving away from the Jewish State where the bromine and potash producer at the Dead Sea Works faces higher taxes royalty charges to Israel for its mines. This is mainly to clean them up, but a new proposed tax grab by the Sheshinski Committee of the Knesset (congress) has added to its Ethiopian exodus plans.

Now ISCHF is moving operations to Ethiopia big time. It plans to invest $600 mn in a fertilizer plant to turn Ethiopia into Africa's potash center. This move, announced yesterday by ISCHF's parent, Israel Corp. (which also has to change its name), came after ISCHF earlier bought a 30% stake for $25 mn in Canada's Allana Potash and committed $600,000 to demonstration and training Ethiopian farmers on use of potash and phosphates. We bought into ALLRF (AAA in Canada) on the linkup with ISCHF and sold ISCHF. ISCHF also committed to invest a further $59 mn pending Addis Ababa approvals of its projects, which look like being quickly granted.

The Allana potash mine has favorable conditions like plentiful water supply, but it is over 90 miles southesst from the nearest port. There is no railway and no power station for the project. Now after talks with Ethiopian Pres. Mulalu Teshome's govt, Idan Ofer, who recently moved from Israel to Britain to escape taxes, contrasted its attitude with that of Jerusalem. Ofer told the press he is ready to invest in power plants but it is not clear if he means hydro, geothermal, or wind. ALLRF is up 6.5%.

*Reckitt Benckiser hit a new 52-wk high (at GBP 51.15) today after it announced a new initiative in its pharmaceuticals business with a nasal spray to treat opioid and heroin overdoses. We assumed that the drug delivery business at RBGLY was for sale after its patent ran out on Suboxone sublingual delivery system for a longer-acting combo of naloxone and buprenorphine to replace heroin. Now it has a new delivery system for overdoses, again avoiding the dreaded needle, thanks to its accord with AntiOp Inc (of Kentucky) for developing a spray to deliver naloxone, and the option to buy it. Using a squirt is less scary for family members, caregivers, or emergency services than an injection. RBGLY mainly makes personal and household products and its pharma business is reportedly for sale or spinoff to shareholders. Now the pharma line has been enhanced.

*Christiansen Capital LLC told Seekingalpha.com that he or it likes “special situation” Mongolia Growth Fund for a “growth run”. It cited Mongolia's fast growth and the shift in MNGGF (YAK in Canada) away from a broad investor to focus on retail and office real estate under new a CEO. Property specialist Paul Byrne, who replaces generalist founder Harris Kupperman (now chairman) will steer MNGGF which the anonymous writer thinks will convert into a REIT alongside a private equity firm. It may not: there are still too many parts. Most of the points Christiansen made have already been reported by our Man on Mongolia, Martin Ferera, except for the REIT conversion and private equity spinoff.

Another booster of what he calls YAK is Travis Johnson in The Stock Gumshoe, a verbose website I subscribe to, and which I reprint from with permission after cutting. He wrote:

“Mongolia, the growth darling of frontier markets a few years ago, the poster child for nonviolent political risk, and still one of the fastest growing economies in the world. We touched on Mongolia a few times back when every growth investor loved the country, but haven't checked in for a while.

Mongolia itself is a small cap to a degree that's hard to imagine for US investors. The country is physically large, roughly the size of Alaska, and home to a wealth of natural resources, but the Mongolian GDP puts the size of their economy at just over $10 bn, what it produces in goods and services in a given year. (That's from 2012, before the Oyu Tolgoi mine opened but it won't be dramatically higher in 2013 during the initial ramp up of the mine and the associated development. Alaska's GDP, in case you're curious, is almost $50 bn thanks to oil.) That means the Mongolian economy is less than half the size of El Salvador's. The population is tiny (3 million people, about a third of whom live in and around the Capital though to continue our largely pointless comparison, 3x the population of Alaska). It's been a subsistence-based nomadic economy for decades, relying on cashmere sales and small scale (at least after the Russians left) coal sales for their foreign exchange.

“The base is extremely small, why Mongolia can post huge GDP growth from a relatively small amount of foreign investment and economic development. GDP is likely to continue growing at between 10-15% for the next few years as Oyu Tolgoi ramps up to full capacity (to account for more than a quarter of Mongolian GDP in the next decade); Tavan Tolgoi (a nearby mega coal mine) gets fully developed; and the government which issued bonds for this, invests to upgrade infrastructure, including rail lines, roads, and upgrades to utilities and roadways in the capital, Ulanbaatar.

“Copper, coal, gold, silver and perhaps oil will bring long term growth to Mongolia after several decades of no real development. And that has spurred interest among foreign investor, particularly in 2010-2011 when Oyu Tolgoi was just starting to be built and the government had not yet stepped in with additional demands to scare off foreign investors. The fall in commodity prices and fear of China's waning growth (Mongolia exports almost exclusively to China), along with the difficulty in funding mineral exploration projects, seems to have forced Mongolian politicians to realize that they went a step too far in deterring foreign investment. The pendulum seems to be swinging back now, with a focus on investing for better-managed economic growth.

“YAK has been around for several years and has had some existential problems, particularly in figuring out exactly what they were going to invest in and how they were going become profitable. The initial strategy was essentially just that a few hedge fund guys wanted to take some long-term equity and create a Mongolian company because the country was clearly going to show tremendous growth but there wasn't anything really investable in the country yet - so they raised capital, including a lot of their own money, and listed on an alternative exchange in Canada and started building a company that should benefit from Mongolia's expected boom without being in mining. They started by funding an insurance company and buying up condos and office buildings to serve the huge rush of expatriates who were rolling into town to make deals and didn't want to live in a ger. Founder and then-CEO Harris Kupperman essentially [flew in to buy] whatever was for sale.

“What Mongolia Growth would like, above all, is to be the company Starbucks calls when they get the urge to put five coffee shops in downtown Ulanbaatar. The goal is to bring in outside capital to fund major redevelopment projects, getting up to scale quickly. To do that they either need to create captive investment pools like a separate REIT or private equity funds, or they need to sell a lot of shares or borrow money. I suspect they'll add a bit of leverage to the balance sheet, but they want primarily to lever their expertise in Mongolian property management by using other peoples' money - contributing land or undeveloped property and expertise and using investment funds from outside the company, then maintaining partial ownership and getting management fee income. The founders continue to be large shareholders, and the new CEO bought shares at the market price when he was hired, and they seem to be resistant to the idea of mass equity dilution... which is good.

“It sounds like a rational plan, and real estate should be a substantial beneficiary of Mongolia's still somewhat unclear urban renewal and development plans as the economy grows, so I'm willing to go along for the ride. They have so far raised about C$50 mn and spent about C$40 mn on acquiring property, so at an $80 mn market cap right now they trade for about twice what they've invested in building their assets. I don't know if that investment includes renovation or redevelopment work. Given the uncertainty of knowing what the fair value is of their property portfolio now, I think that's still a reasonable valuation for a very speculative, long-term play on Mongolian development.

“I started buying [MNGGF] last year when it fell to $3, and added more to my holdings today in the US$2.20 neighborhood - this is certainly yet another play that's dependent on commodity pricing and Chinese demand, at least to some degree (since Mongolia's development is being fueled by copper and coal, their only real near-term assets of great value), so I'm mindful of the risk, but this is another of the small investments I make that are ways of getting experts to manage money for you in a market where you couldn't reasonably invest on your own.” Between them, they have pushed MNGGF up ~2%.

*Here is another tip from Travis, also reprinted with permission and also cut, on what he calls AOF:

“I look for expert investors to manage money for me in Africa, where last year I've built a position in a London-traded closed end fund, Africa Opportunity Fund (AOF in London, AROFF on the pink sheets). There's no big news, and it's not necessarily a bargain buy right now (it's trading for almost exactly what the net asset value per share), but they just altered their listing in London and management recently raised money so that they can go after additional investment opportunities. So checking in. This is a value fund, with a hedge fund fee structure (2% of assets/20% of gains over a hurdle). They are diversified across the continent but have particularly large investments in Ghana, Senegal, and Zambia and substantial sector weightings in financial services, retail, telecom and mining. Unlike Africa ETFs, their holdings are not dominated by South Africa, the most mature economy in sub-Saharan Africa and a generally less compelling growth story than Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ghana.

“AOF recently moved to change its listing [to] a publicly-traded fund on the LSE [London Stock Exchange] rather than as a corporation on the small-cap AIM, of limited importance to small individual shareholders like myself. For a closed-end fund like this to have cash to invest, they have to sell more shares. They just did so, creating a new class of "C" shares that they sold for a dollar apiece (the regular shares were around $1.20 at the time, and are still). This created confusion because some folks initially thought that this meant the new shares were at a discount to net asset value - but that's not the case.

“What they did was raise a separate pool of capital by selling these C shares, [ticker AOFC in London]. They will invest that capital into their ideas using their portfolio strategy, but still as a separate pool, and then, once more than 85% of the cash raised has been invested, the C shares should convert to regular shares based on the net asset values of both C and regular shares at the time of conversion (so it won't be 1:1). Here's what they said in the prospectus:

“'On such conversion, each holder of C Shares will receive such number of Ordinary Shares as equals the number of C Shares held by them multiplied by the Net Asset Value per C Share and divided by the Net Asset Value per Ordinary Share (subject to a discount of 5%), in each case as at a date shortly prior to Conversion.'

“C shares will end up [with] a boost when converted, [from] that 5% discount at conversion but it's not huge, and the pool of funds invested for these C shares will not be in exactly the same as the current portfolio, nor at exactly the same weightings. Sp it's impossible to tell which class of shares will be better a year from now. If they get a big idea that requires a large investment in the next couple months, [it] would likely be made using the C share capital. Right now, the NAV of regular shares is $1.20 (April 30) the NAV of the C shares is 97 cents.

"Conversion could also be delayed if litigation over the fund's holding inShoprite shares is underway in 6 months, which is possible (they're apparently going to be sued for buying shares that Shoprite says they sold by mistake. [AROFF] don't seem worried. It's the kind of wackiness you get in immature markets and a good reason to use a fund manager). Essentially, buying C shares instead of regular shares means you think the ideas they are looking to invest in with new capital right now will do better than the ideas that are already in their portfolio. Or, you don't really care and you just want to buy whichever one happens to trade at a discount to NAV on any given day. Hard to predict whether the next six months or year will bring any drama, so I'm happy owning the regular shares - I didn't buy any of the C shares in the offering.

“Fund management is optimistic. Their own internal assessment of the value of the portfolio was at $1.48/share for the regular shares as of March (trading closed at $1.22). From their March newsletter:

"'Outlook: We believe that AOF's portfolio possesses undervalued companies. Its top 10 holdings combined offer a weighted average dividend yield of 3.6%, a P/E ratio of 15.1X, a return on assets of 8.1% and a return on equity of 13.8%. We are excited by these attractive valuation metrics and remain optimistic about AOF's prospects.'”

*Mail.ru is a holding of our Naspers of S. Africa. The huge Calpers pension fund is dumping its shares in the Russian e-mail site because its 52% owner, Alisher Usmanov, the richest man in Russia, attacks gays through another website he controls, VKontakte. VKontakte last month fired its liberal editor and now its sites show vigilante violence against people accused of being homosexuals, according to The Financial Times. It also blocks US internet users from visiting VKontakte which hosts Occupy Paedophilia, a neo-Nazi group (according to the FT). While Alisher controls Mail.ru, NPSNY owns only 18%. Our reporter, Harry Geisel, writes: Since Naspers doesn't contorl Mail.ru, selling it seems extreme to me. I might write asking them if they have done due diligence regarding RU's ownership.NPSNY.

Ed: he will follow up. Travis owns Mail.ru but is thinking of going honest and buying Yandex instead. YNDX is Dutch and is therefore spared the Russian knout or clout.

*Delek Group underwriters exercised their green shoe option increasing the secondary stock offer to 10.58 mn shares in Delek US Holdings (DK), and the total raised to NIS 140 mn (~$40.5 mn.) Delek Group now owns only 7.5% and is using some of the money raised to pay back early the series B7 shekel debentures of its subDelek Pete. Here's why Israel's Warren Buffett, Yitzchak Tshuva, is raising money:

Egypt is now negotiating to buy natural gas from the Delek-controlled Tamar offshore field via intermediaries. They are: the operator of Tamar, US Noble Energy, and Spain's Union Fenosa SA (UF), which wants to buy $20 bn of the gas and send it to the Nile Delta by reversing the flow of the trans-Sinai pipeline. It could then feed the Damieta gas liquefaction plant in the Nile Delta, which has been shuttered for 2 years.

UF's Damieta LNG plant is 20% owned by the Cairo govt which UF is suing for $6 bn in international courts. The Morsi govt banned gas exports to make up for a domestic shortfall. As part of any deal, UF will have to withdraw its suit.

Another player may spring up in Israeli offshore too, BG Group, which we sold because it too ran into problems during the Arab Spring. BRGGY is trying to buy into an even larger offshore field, Leviathan, also mainly owned by DGRLY. However, unlike UF, BG is constrained in talks to buy even more Israeli gas because it operates in many boycott-hungry Arab countries beside Egypt.

*The chairman of Cosan and its Raizen transport sub, Rubens Omitto Silveira Mello, attacked Brasilia's price controls on gasoline and ethanol as a “disaster”. Speaking up as Omitto has is rare in Brazil. CZZ

*India note 1: I am not sure how the A la Modi government will handle this but an Indian court has just shut in 26 iron mines which will hurt one of India's big export earners. Even before the court ruling, Indian iron exports fell to ~22 mn tonnes last year from as much as 118 mn before the global economic crisis. This is clearly good news for Brazil's Vale however.

*India note 2: Dr Reddy's Lab continues to sag and now was downrated to equal weight by Morgan Stanley. It fell another 4.6%. Narendra Modi doesn't lift all boats.

*India note 3: A likely beneficiary of the pro-business new New Delhi government should be Ascendas India Trust of Singapore which owns office buildings with retails stores below, rented mostly to IT contractors and international stores. Getting rid of restrictions should help ACNDF lease more space at higher prices.

Singapore reader SMH worries about exit liquidity with Ascendas funds; I think they are very widely held among the US and global non-resident Indian community. Moreover ACNDF managers like to buy on weakness. ACNDF hasn't traded today but its bid is up 6% to 61 cents and its asked at 64.5 cents. The NRI's are still trying to figure things out.

*After reporting for Q1, Canadian Solar faces headwinds ranging from worry about its high debt to worries about its relatively high prices for solar cells. But the main worry is about its low earnings of 7 cents/sh in Q1. Despite this, CSIQ beat its guidance with sales of $466 mn vs $415-430 mn. The high priced solar cells and low earnings are a one-off from a fire which obliged CSIQ to buy cells from outside firms which also boosted the cost. Its business is not selling solar cells or arrays, but building worldwide rather than in China where the solar switch is proving more difficult than expected. CSIQ however is not dependent on Chinese solar subsidies as much as other producers, as it is focused on utility solar plant projects rather than selling modules. In fact, China may well direct its subsidies more at power plants than at module makers, which would help Canadian Solar. At $22/sh, CSIQ is at half its level at the start of the year. The sell-off is overdone but may reflect a need to raise more funding by stock sales (it already has a high debt load.) These are my conclusions from reading two conflicting reports on CSIQ: bullish by Abdalla Al-Ayrot and more nuanced, by anonymous by “Casual Analyst”.

*Other hedge funds buying into Nokia, besides David Einhorn's Greenlight, include George Soros' family fund, and Dan Loeb's Third Point. NOK