Irish Times Article20 Oct 2025 15:11
Https://www.irishtimes.com/business/markets/2025/10/17/trumps-peace-tour-piles-pressure-on-tullow-oil-as-13bn-refinancing-looms/
It all couldn’t come at a worse time for Tullow Oil, the Irish-founded oil explorer, as it faces a make-or-break refinancing of $1.3 billion of debt that falls due in May. Highly indebted companies typically seek to replace maturing borrowings 12-18 months before they fall due to avoid becoming a hostage to their creditors.
Tullow’s 2026 bonds are changing hands at less than 84 cents on the dollar – down from almost 96 cents in January – reflecting concerns in the bond market that investors may not get all their money back.
Bondholders haven’t been cowering behind their screens. Bloomberg reported last month that a group of them has tapped US investment bank Houlihan Lokey and law firm Weil, Gotshal & Mange, to advise them on their options as the maturity looms.
Large bondholders now include Astaris Capital Management, Caius Capital, Melqart Asset Management and Tresidor Investment Management – all opportunistic hedge funds focused on what’s known in industry jargon as “event-driven credit situations”. They’re not the kind of fellows a company likes to see mopping up its debt on the bond market.
Founded in the 1980s by ex-Aer Lingus accountant Aidan Heavey, using money from family and friends to revive old Senegalese gasfields, the company came crashing out of the FTSE 100 in 2015. Debt ballooned to $4.8 billion by 2016; Heavey left two years later.
Since then, the stock has nosedived, hit by failed drilling campaigns, production setbacks, executive churn, large writedowns and cash crunch warnings. Tullow shut down its Dublin office in 2020 and exited the Irish stock market in 2022, although a loyal band of retail investors still holds on.
A mix of asset sales, deep cost cuts, and surging oil prices helped the company pull off a $1.8 billion debt refinancing in 2021 and start chipping away at its substantial liabilities.
It’s not just declining oil prices that are weighing on Tullow, as most of that debt approaches maturity.
Now focused entirely on its Jubilee and TEN oilfields off the Ghana coast – after selling its assets in Gabon (raising $300 million) and Kenya (in a deal worth up to $120 million) this year – Tullow downgraded its 2025 production and free cash flow targets in August following a maintenance shutdown and higher than expected water levels coming out of certain Jubilee wells.
The company appointed oil industry veteran Ian Perks last month as chief executive – its fourth in six years. He brings 30 years of experience in oil and gas exploration and production, having held senior roles at big producers such as Anadarko Petroleum and TotalEnergies. He made his immediate focus clear in the announcement: “To put the company on a long-term sustainable financial footing.”
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