FT Article6 Aug 2022 22:30
"Oil and gas producer Harbour Energy is in a seller’s market as an oil and gas producer, especially given its European base of operations. Its key shareholder, EIG Asset Management, of which Harbour chair Blair Thomas is the chief executive, is selling as well, offloading £5.6mn in shares in the last week of July.
The timing was not perfect — its share price has fallen 29 per cent since May — but this is small beer for the North Sea company’s main shareholder, which had already cut its holding in Harbour from 37 to 15 per cent last month.
That was because EIG handed its fund investors direct stakes in Harbour. “As EIG is still the largest shareholder following the distribution, we remain committed to the sector, confident in the company’s current strategy and supportive of its management team,” said Thomas. The holding is now worth just under £500mn.
The share price drop follows a wider industry sell-off in recent weeks, driven by recession concerns and a slightly weaker oil price. Of course, gas prices remain astronomical and even in the US, where petrol and diesel prices have come up from comparatively low levels, demand destruction has been limited.
Harbour itself has had a dramatic few months at a corporate level, too, landing in the FTSE 100 in May on Ferguson’s demotion and then dropping back out last month because of GSK’s (GSK) spin-off of Haleon.
Chief executive Linda Cook also appeared before Parliament’s environmental audit committee alongside local bosses for Shell and BP. In that company, Harbour is an outlier in that it is not also investing in renewables and other green technology. Cook told MPs that was not the point of the company: “We are acquiring relatively mature assets from larger, typically major, oil and gas companies that they are no longer investing in and which are no longer strategic for them,” she said."
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