Member Info for droderick

Dear Leesadee,

Given your vast knowledge of the UK, EU and global gas markets, can you please share with us what the impact on gas prices were during:

1. Fortis Pipeline System shutdown
2. Beast from the East
3. Kollsness outage
4. Baumgarten fire
5. Groningen shutdown
6. Russia Ukraine transit gas failure

Moving globally:

1. Overall slowing down of natgas production in the US
2. NOCs pulling out of Canada as the marginal price per MMBTU of gas made the project uneconomic

So from what you are saying, we don't need gas storage AT ALL, not even in mainland UK because we should live in the confidence that 70% of our winter gas is imported and by your logic, nothing adverse happens to either commercial contracts or ageing infrastructure.

Finally, we need to wait for a massive outage only then gas storage can be deemed of any use in your eyes.

You are either totally naive or completely deluded or both.

Dear Mr T,

Setanta has got his numbers wrong.

Infa paid £500k as part consideration in October 2019
Infa paid £500k + VAT for costs for November 2019
From December onwards, all costs are Infa's costs without VAT to the administrator

The final consideration due in April 2020 is £1.45 million not £1.49 million.

Finally, in an earlier post, Setanta stated that Arun Raman had a million or so shares. That is again factually incorrect. Arun has subscribed to shares in the recent placing and he has bought nearly 7 million shares. Add to that his current holding and it works to over 8 million shares.

Well said Speedy!

Spot on Nerdy Owl,

it is typical of Leesadee to disappear when she is backed into a corner. She has nothing tangible to say. But of course she is the true altruist who is very concerned about shareholders' interests and is keen to see us making a return on our investment, as long as it has nothing to do with IM.

Bottomline: zero credibility, zero data, zero backbone.....100% FAKE NEWS.

Incorrect,

Speedy has his views and he is supportive as well as critical. And there is no problem with that.

You, on the other hand....

Dear Speedy,

For the sake of transparency, I am also sitting on substantial paper losses today. At these levels no one is in the money, even the IIs who invested last month. When I talk of the "good" that has been achieved, I do not refer to morals, principles etc. I don't think anyone here has invested for altruistic purposes. We want to make money. Period.

I am talking about the progress made till date to achieve that objective. That is what I want all of us to reflect upon.

I don't agree with your assessment that things were going very well and now the wheels are coming off. If that indeed were the case, why did all of us vote to remove the BoD in 2017? If things were going swimmingly well, there was zero reason to remove them. The fact is Infa was in deep trouble at that point with very little to look forward to.

The company has been in existence since 2007. Except for the one-off revenues, there have been zero operating revenues for 12 years. That is not the definition of doing well. If things were actually going well, IM should have been built and operational by now. It doesn't take 10 years to build a gas store.

We showed great confidence in AP and PW. Upon reflection, what exactly did AP achieve from June 2017 till October 2018?

I am not being sarcastic, I really want to know. Maybe I am missing something here that all of you are aware of.

JW became the CEO in Aug/Sept 2018 and Arun the CFO in March 2019. Whilst JW has completed slightly over a year, Arun has been CFO for 9 months. If every single jigsaw piece of IM was ready to go, I don't think the two of them would be sitting around waiting and looking at value destruction with any pride. They have also lost their own money through the year. The fact is the project was nowhere near construction ready and they had to pick up the pieces, put them to together and rebuild the whole thing.

So in 15 months and 9 months respectively, the two of them have taken the project to bankable status, have acquired Harland and brought in the company's FIRST EVER OPERATING REVENUES.

I can't answer the question "what do we do going forward" for you. I know what I am going to do. I am going to keep supporting the team. This is a good team with a vision to make money. They are dealing with a long and painful legacy yet they are ploughing on and making sure the company can stand on its own feet. They are balancing the company's risk by diversifying because there is a huge risk with only one project.

There will be disappointments and missed deadlines. Even the biggest companies with all the resources in the world miss deadlines.

But ultimately, they will succeed and we will succeed.

Couldn't agree more.

The BoD have no control over the share price. If the BoD did not have the vision and foresight of resurrecting IM and looking beyond, your investment would be in the delisted and bust category. So its not me, its you who needs to get real.

You clearly have zero belief in anything. No problem, each person to himself/herself. There is no point in having a debate with you, so good luck and go well.

Voicing an opinion is one thing and constant criticism with real no justification is another.

Sorry Setanta, you really need to take a hard look at what JW and team have achieved thus far Vs what the company has achieved from 2008 till 2018 when JW joined.

Your criticism is not voicing concern, it is venting of your frustration. I get this completely as a LTH like you. But there is also a huge floodlight at the end of this tunnel which, surely, you can see.

Based on the response to the two RNSes today, this makes me wonder who the adults are in the room.

Let us take it case by case. FID has been delayed by 3-6 months. The fact that JW and team inherited a basket project and have taken it to a bankable stage seems to have been all but forgotten. I am seeing a lot of links to the ML project website that DAERA have set up but I don't see any positive comments on the reports, the detail to which JW has gone into and the immense amount of data collected and presented to get the ML. If we think all this magically happened with zero effort, let us not make fools of ourselves.

FID has been delayed. So what I am reading is that where there is potential to retain a much larger equity stake in the project, certain LTHs would much rather we give up a massive majority and live with a tiny one for the plc. Is this even rational thinking? Would you rather have X% of a project or X minus 20%?

The comment that JW and team are behaving like cowboys is frankly derisory. They have also put money into the company and this is their full time job. They have no other assignment. They are invested in this company as much as we are. JW has lost his TR1 status and has been diluted down consistently. But clearly, he is doing this because he and the team love losing their own money - I haven't seen such an irrational economic argument.

On the issue of 20 million shares to a professional advisor, every company is bound by non-disclosure clauses for sensitive matters. If JW paid cash for services, we would complain, if he pays shares, we are complaining but wait - we still expect work to be done but for free.

Suddenly logic, good sense and belief have been chucked out of the window.

Can I ask all of us to take a breather over the next few days and reflect on the achievements over the past year? Let's not get hung up over one missed deadline when so much good has been achieved and so much good is yet to come.

I would absolutely zero credence to ER. Sorry Set, the guy is rumour mongering and has nothing today except cast doubt on things that he doesn't even understand. Take you back to a few weeks ago when he admitted that his own environmental work is shoddy. I therefore rest my case.

On the new investors, why would they come in 0.30 and sell at 0.60. They are institutional and are not interested in doubling there monies overnight. They are interested in the strategy and long term value accretion. These guys are into impact investing - employment, rejuvenation of manufacturing, high impact brands etc. I would be amazed if any one of them sell out in the next 12 months.

On Harland, sadly, we will never know who the other bidders were. But you can quite easily guess the UK and European counterparties who would have been interested. With the right strategy, and I believe JW has that, this could be a profitable asset, one that actually feeds the plc and other projects.

On the EU side, I am not sure what all of us expect from the BoD. Are we expecting them to publish email communications with the EU and telephone transcripts. We all agree that the EU is slow. We all agree that the grant to be reclaimed is under a binding legal contract and that the expenditure on FEED has been correctly recorded and audited in each financial report. So why are we constantly crucifying JW and the team for what is probably out of their control and can only push things along as much as they can.

Finally, I don't agree there was a unilateral decision made by the BoD. The deal was signed but was subject to the fund raise that was approved by shareholders, you and me included. As shareholders, we could have said no and the H&W deal would have collapsed. So it is not correct at all to say the decision was unilateral. We had the power to reject the deal.

I don't mean to pick on anyone, but we really need to be pragmatic here. Nothing is easy and the pressure on JW and the team is enormous. Give them a break and let them get on with it.

Act in haste and regret at leisure. Let the BoD get on with what needs to be done. A few weeks if delay is not going to break anyone's bank. I can only imagine the number of hours JW and the team are putting in to close the H&W deal, get the first contracts in and to meet the milestones.

Islandmagee has always been complicated and JW and team have given it some legs. Equally, as shareholders, we want a decent return on our investment in a company as a whole, not only one single project. The strategy of de-risking the balance sheet away from just one project and introducing immediate revenue streams is a sound one. I don't think when we close the current financial year 2019-20 with a decent revenue line anyone will be complaining.

Does anyone know how Snowman is doing - fingers crossed!

Completely agree Mr Truimph,

Anyone who has dealt with grants from the EU should be well aware of the hoops that need jumping through. Let us not forget that we are dealing with the EU in conjunction with 2 other member states separately (UK and NI) so effectively everyone needs to sign off before it formally gets processed in Brussels.

The issue is about tying up the different organisations in the different member states all together. That in itself is a time consuming and laborious process. I personally think there is no doomsday scenario here. The monies are under a legally binding grant, they have been legitimately spent on the FEED that the audited annual reports have confirmed and it is a matter of process.

The dust is now settling post the Harland acquisition. It has now been formally completed and the first set of revenues have now been announced. This is fantastic news and it completely validates the acquisition. The fact that JW and team are determined to turn this company around into a revenue generating entity gets my complete respect and support. The markets are extremely treacherous and liquidity is at an all time low. To have raised this sum of money and closed a significant transaction relative to the company's size is an incredible achievement.

What has happened this year is simple: a company that was effectively going nowhere has been radically transformed to the point of generating maiden revenues and with a much larger portfolio of revenue streams to play for. The ultimate ambition of all shareholders is to earn a sizeable return on our investment. JW and his team are also shareholders and are completely aligned to all of us. I can see a very bright future going forward.

Let us pause for a moment and give due credit to the management team - they have earned it.

Snowman - my very best wishes to you for a speedy recovery!

Use primary bid - fill the coffers!

Cheers Radders.

Setanta: Respectfully, we agree to disagree.

Dear Longlad,

Appreciate your views. Given that we don't run the company on a daily basis, we are not privy to the intricacies of the daily grind. We can only, at best, try and join the dots and make sense of it all.

Couple of things come to mind. I don't think JW is adopting a scatter gun approach. He is aligning projects that link up with each other. The current team have experience in energy infrastructure and running operations like H&W. So I think they are playing to their strengths.

I actually agree with the whole strategy of creating a portfolio of assets and not just trying to live off one. A number of fellow LTHs have asked why not complete IM and then venture into something else.

The trouble that I see with that argument is that opportunities don't wait for anyone. If one exists and fits into the overall strategy, we should go for it. To be fair, that's exactly what JW has done. By doing so, he has not jeopardised IM's position, rather, strengthened it by creating a bigger, stronger and more tangible balance sheet.

My view is simple: this is currently a non-revenue generating company. H&W has the capability of generating early revenues and making this company self-sufficient financially. There is no deviation of focus and both IM and H&W are aligned. I therefore think that despite the short term pain, the returns will be very good. For me personally, I would rather have a small stake in a £500 million company than a large stake in a £6 million outfit.

Dear Setanta,

1. Primary Bid is just one short run mechanism and I don't see anything wrong especially given that a £5.5MM raise has a more dilutive effect. And may I add, all for good reason.

2. Not sure why the BoD have to show their commitment by constantly being asked to but shares. I was referring to your implication more than anything else. The expectation is for them to work their socks off and also bring personal financial resources to keep us happy - that's unfair.

3. I laid out in earlier posts the milestones that the BoD have achieved on IM. The milestone for the ML was achieved on 31 Oct and confirmed by DAERA. It is now in their court - what more do we expect?

I am certainly not trying to single you out for criticism. That is absolutely not the intent. All I am saying is that there has to be a degree of reasonableness. The trouble I am seeing is that the frustration of the last 10 years is being boiled over onto this BoD, who are doing the best they can and more, in these very difficult and uncertain times.