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It'd be a bit embarrassing to sell the company for substantially less than the 11p cash agreed with Tenaz.

It's not that uncommon for a company to say they know of no reason for a major share price fall. So far, Petrofac hasn't made that statement. The lack of director buys is also concerning.

Reminds me of Jadestone. Just kept dropping week after week. No one on the boards knew why. Then it turned out they'd screwed up their cash management/debt capacity and needed to raise as a precaution. All the big holders had already been consulted and the market clearly knew even though retail didn't.

I don't have a position - or even a view - but I thought people would find the Telegraph article interesting.

D during the US housing crisis because borrowers are less indebted and UK banks far less exposed.

Nevertheless, any sharp correction will still be widely felt. The proportion of UK pension funds invested in property assets is anywhere between 2pc and 6pc depending on the type of pension scheme, according to the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association.

That is relatively minor compared to 43pc for bonds and 42pc for equities. Yet, the UK pension fund market accounts for £2.3 trillion of assets so that’s still a vast amount of money tied up in bricks and mortar.

For some of the world’s biggest funds the concentration is much higher. At the $300bn California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which oversees the retirement savings of nearly 1m of the state’s teachers, real estate makes up 17pc of its total assets.

Meanwhile property funds like those set up by Columbia Threadneedle and M&G were deliberately targeted at retail investors that wanted exposure to high-quality commercial property that had previously been out of reach to all but the wealthiest of buyers.

Away from the big players the ownership of Britain’s commercial property is actually massively fragmented. Swathes of the middle classes have piled into the market, particularly as buy-to-let taxation has become more punitive.

“It’s amazing how many big name retail and restaurant brands leased high street properties from the local doctor, dentist, or semi-pro-landlord and their pension pots,” a restructuring expert says.

Pension specialists are expecting an exodus of investors from commercial property in the coming months as increasing numbers of large companies look to get these burdens off their balance sheets by selling them on to pension buyouts vehicles.

By some estimates, there are roughly 1,000 schemes in the UK that are now fully funded and considering a buyout. As much as £650bn of assets is poised to change hands. But there’s an issue, which is that very few of these specialist insurers want much exposure to illiquid commercial real estate assets.

“People are talking about the issues with commercial property investment but I don’t think many have clocked this one. The selling pressure from pension buyouts is going to be a big problem, it’s just hard to know for sure how big,” one investment chief says.

“There is just so much of this stuff sitting in pension funds that are about to become forced sellers. It could turn very ugly very quickly.”

Decision of tech giant Meta to pay a £149m break fee to forfeit the lease on its eight-storey office in Regent’s Park has reverberated around the capital. Analysts at BNP Paribas Exane said Meta had paid a “huge surrender premium” to give up approximately 310,000 sq ft of prime real estate.

The bankruptcy of flexible working poster child WeWork – expected in the coming days – will cast another sizeable shadow over London’s office market. WeWork owns 3.25m square feet of space in central London, with a total annual rent roll of £192m, according to Jefferies.

The crunch has been felt most acutely in Canary Wharf where several major tenants have decided to up sticks and move to smaller premises in the City.

HSBC is swapping the 45-storey office tower it has been in for more than two decades for a building half its size as part of plans to reduce office space around the world by 40pc. Law firm Clifford Chance is also departing for the Square Mile. The exodus has prompted questions about the future of what was once Britain’s premier financial district.

Elsewhere, two blocks belonging to one Hong Kong-based investor have fallen into the hands of receivers after it defaulted on its loans. At around 17pc, office vacancy levels in the Docklands district are two and half times those found in London’s West End.

In a bid to entice workers back to their desks, property executives say big companies want to be located as close to the major transport hubs as possible – and are prepared to pay a premium for the privilege.

The concern however is that this will lead to a polarisation with less desirable areas emptying out as firms cluster around the same few prime spots above and around key train and Tube stations. Industry figures point to entire streets of so-called “secondary properties” in outer London that have been left deserted.

The big test could come in the credit markets where lending has tightened dramatically. Commercial real estate loans valued at roughly £150bn are due to be refinanced during the next five years in the UK, according to research by the Bayes Business School.

“This is an issue for lenders and pension funds. In some circumstances, we may see some forbearance or even loans modified, which may allow some locations to restructure or repurpose. Banks will be looking at lower valuations and in turn, face potential provisions on these loans. These conversations are happening right now globally,” David Fleming, UK head of restructuring at Kroll says.

Bayes estimates there could be a funding gap of as much as £37bn when those loans come up for refinancing as a result of valuation falls and lending drying up. According to MSCI data, third quarter lending volumes are down 57pc on 2022 levels – the lowest since 2010 – as lenders become increasingly nervous.

The Bank of England says a commercial property downturn does not represent a threat to financial stability in the way that it di

L financial crisis”, it said.

For some senior observers the parallels with those dark days are inescapable. When the US housing market came crashing down it emerged that credit agencies had been in thrall to the banks who paid their fees. They failed to sound the alarm over the fundamental flaws in trillions of mortgage-backed securities.

In the UK commercial property market valuations are a result of discussions between owners, auditors and valuation agents.

“At the moment it’s in no one’s interests to mark this stuff down even though the gap with the actual market is getting wider”, a senior City lawyer says.

Many owners are hoping they can ride out the correction until values rebound because steep writedowns can have serious knock-on effects.

One investment professional compares the relationship between property companies and banks to “two drunks propping each other up” – rising rates push down property values, which impairs banks’ loan books. This in turn makes them less likely to refinance existing loans, turning property owners into forced sellers, which further squeezes values.

The first real cracks in the commercial property market began to emerge in the weeks following the Liz Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-Budget fiasco when a series of large property funds backed by some of the world’s largest asset managers were suddenly gated.

Columbia Threadneedle, Blackrock and Schroders all restricted withdrawals from funds with a collective value of around £9bn after spooked investors ran for the exit.

Last month, another three funds run by M&G, St James Place, and Canada Life followed suit. Analysts say interest among investors has continued to dwindle as sharply rising interest rates collide with falling property values.

M&G expects it will take approximately 18 months for the majority of its portfolio to be sold in the current climate.

Oli Creasey, analyst at Quilter Cheviot said a “dripping tap” of redemptions makes it harder to return cash to investors as capital shrinks and the number of high quality assets diminishes.

He expects further exits: “Will the last one out…please turn off the lights?”, Creasey said.

Offices are particularly vulnerable because of the dramatic shift in working patterns after the pandemic. England’s office stock at the beginning of the year was falling at the fastest rate for two decades, analysis of business rates data by law firm Boodle Hatfield found.

Occupancy rates are less than half pre-Covid levels in the UK, at around 35pc, according to Remit Consulting. This compares with typical pre-pandemic levels of 60pc to 80pc. With mid-week remaining the peak time for attendance, levels can plummet to below 20pc on Fridays, its research shows.

With London office occupancy at a three-decade low, Jefferies analyst Mike Prew has warned of an office “rental recession”.

The pain is increasingly being felt at the very top of big business. The

It was 2002 and with New Labour still riding high on the back of the largest-ever second-term majority in British electoral history, Tony Blair and his entourage swept into the building.

GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical powerhouse formed from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, had spent £330m constructing a shiny new headquarters in Brentford, and who better to bless its opening than a Prime Minister who had promised to make Britain “the number one place to do business in the world”?

The sprawling campus was a giant all-glass monument to the rise of big business amid Blair’s unabashed embrace. Named ‘The Street’, the main thoroughfare of GSK House contains cafes, restaurants, a convenience store, and even a hairdresser. There is also a small river in the lobby that guests have been known to accidentally step in, and a permanent window-cleaning team on site.

A little over two decades later and GSK is struggling to recoup even a quarter of what it cost to construct a campus that at the time was one of the largest and most expensive corporate headquarters in Europe.

After putting it up for sale in 2021, The Telegraph understands that GSK has received bids in the region of between £70m and £80m. GSK declined to comment.

The prospect of GSK selling for such a knock-down price will stoke fresh fears of a fierce commercial property crash that could cascade through the UK economy. Offices are a keystone of the commercial property market, which was valued at $1.6 trillion (£1.3 trillion) at the beginning of the year by consultants at CBRE.

The boss of one major residential builder who had looked at turning the GSK site into high-end flats said even at that level some potential buyers were nervous about the possibility of catching “a falling knife”.

Landlords of shops, warehouses and office blocks have been engulfed by a perfect storm of post-pandemic working patterns, sharply rising interest rates, and the exorbitant costs of new green regulations.

Industry figures are braced for a steep correction in prices that could rival some of the worst downturns ever seen with office blocks expected to bear the brunt of the fallout.

Uber-bearish Citi analyst Aaron Guy kicked off the year with a prediction that sent shockwaves through the property world: values of offices in the capital would fall by nearly 40pc in the next two to three years, and rents would almost halve, he forecast.

According to his most recent research, London office values have fallen 26pc in the City and 14pc in the West End, which means further sharp falls could be coming.

But there remains a big gap between what investors believe assets are worth and what prospective buyers are willing to pay, which means the full extent of painful writedowns has yet to be felt.

Investment research firm MSCI calculates the disparity is somewhere between 20pc and 35pc in core office markets – “far worse than the height of the globa

“What do you call a stock that’s down 90%? A stock that was down 80% and then got cut in half.” — David Einhorn

A 50% drop is a 50% drop.

I think that dividend target is very likely to be exceeded, primarily because interest rates have risen and repaid loans are being recycled into higher interest loans.

The tiny cut in 2017 is irrelevant. The dividend dropped in 2022 because of the merger and the issue of shares. The new PE side of the business wasn't really making any money so the FCF available from the investment assets couldn't cover as much dividend per share because there were more shares. That's why the new shares issued to old pollen street holders aren't receiving full dividends. They wanted to give time for the PE side of the business to produce the predicted FCF. The merger would probably been rejected without that.

"As part of the terms of the Combination, former Pollen Street Capital Holdings Limited shareholders waived dividends paid to them in 2022 and 2023 with respect to approximately 50 per cent of the shares issued to them by the Group. As such, the

dividend targets correspond to a dividend per share of 16p for each quarter for 2023 and at least 25.5p for each half year for

2024."

IMO old honeycomb shareholders got screwed over, but the shares crashed as a result and I don't invest through the rear view mirror.

All that ever mattered.

"Every Major in the world would love to operate and develop Shaikan.

Once it is legitimised."

You're absolutely right. That's why the current contracts are untenable.

You should not want them to get it back up. Spending money on capex in Morocco destroys value because the targets suck. They were bad to start with but unsurprisingly they've already picked off the best ones.

Exploration drilling further away with bigger targets is a gamble which may or may not work. Drilling all the tiddlers they know about burns money.

It's paid research. It's worthless. I've been telling you that for over a year. They've had SDX as a "House Stock" since 3rd Jan 2023 when the shares were 8.5p.

You're an absolute fool if you think their research is objective or motivated by anything other than pleasing their client (that's not you!)

Paid research (worthless)

Penny stocks attract idiots and rampers and this is a good example.

The market cap is less than £8M now of course it'll move around a lot in % terms, it comes with the territory.

On and on it goes

No, you're priced for the PSC not being valid.