Sunday times highlights.18 Jan 2026 09:20
The High Court judge went further still, noting that San Leon’s “directors may be in breach of their statutory obligations by allowing the plaintiff to continue to trade when it was unable to pay its debts when they fell due”, concluding that “prima facie evidence suggests that the plaintiff may be insolvent and trading unlawfully”.
San Leon Energy has been about a month away from a transformational funding deal for roughly the past two years.
The identity of the backer might have changed from time to time.
San Leon’s various public statements have shown, it has spent the past two years or so perched on the verge of closing out that one big investment.
Oisín Fanning — entangled in a thicket of litigation, high-profile fights with creditors, a spectacular falling-out with one putative backer, and the indignity of having to delist from the London Stock Exchange over the late filing of financial reports.
In the High Court in Dublin last week it lost a battle to prevent a pipeline construction firm from petitioning to wind it up over a heavily contested debt. Worse still, the judge in the case made it clear that he thought San Leon was insolvent.
San Leon’s involvement in the project is complex, but as it happens Justice Liam Kennedy in the High Court gave a pretty succinct summary of it in his judgment last week.
Over the course of several months, while the company was still listed on the London Stock Exchange, San Leon told investors that the money was delayed, and then further delayed, and then delayed again.
San Leon’s other fundraising efforts also proved fruitless. As the judge’s ruling noted, in December 2023, San Leon “stated that its directors were flying to the Middle East that Sunday to sign funding agreements with another party”.
Justice Kennedy ultimately ruled in favour of Brightwaters, concluding that San Leon had “entered into the transaction confident that funding was in place, shouldering that risk”. He rejected San Leon’s “contention that it was under no obligation to pay [Brightwaters] as promised”.
“one of the remarkable features of Mr Fanning’s affidavit is what Mr Fanning does not say. Nowhere in Mr Fanning’s affidavit is he willing to swear that San Leon is solvent. He simply ignores this issue.”
According to market sources, the funding deal should be in place within the month. But as the past two years have shown, a month can be a long time.
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