Member Info for getafgrip

Don't get too excited too quickly. Tax breaks are only of any use if Deltic starts getting some revenue flow, or monetisation & this is some distance away.

The tax breaks might be very attractive to a profitable company, tempted to take over Deltic & acquire the tax breaks. But, they would be taking over an entity that is more tax breaks than company. In all likelihood they would then at some stage be looking at selling off the rump of Deltic if they don't see a small oil & gas exploration company becoming part of their core business.

It is not very straightforward, but although it would be messy, Shell or Dana might want to offset some of their profits.

MegRS300 - you really should state it as it is! But, unfortunately you are stating uncomfortable facts that some on this thread simply do not necessarily want to hear!

Putin is essentially a very nice Slav, trained by the state & in the underworld of St Petersburg. It is obvious that he can't wait to end the war with Ukraine, and he is doubtless straining at the leash to return the Rosneft stake to BP shareholders with all their confiscated dividends. This is the guy who made Grozny the capital of Chechnya the most bombed real estate in the world. "All wars end" (like the Crusades I suppose), are words spoken by those who have never heard of the millions of Ukrainians killed in the Holodomor, one of Stails numerous purges, and have not even a tenuous inkling of the Slav mentality. He will fight to the death of his last citizen & ally without doubt.

Putin, is that nice man who arranges free flying lessons from the upper floors of hospitals, for patients who have decided to discharge themselves early. Any dissenting voices & free holidays are provided in the Russian Siberian Gulags. Opponents are frequently removed by poisoning, or something they ate that disagreed with them. Literally billions of dollars have been siphoned off from the Russian state into Putin's personal coffers, and abroad to rogue states, to foment subversion & disruption around the world.

Oligarchs have been made and then broken by the state, often along with the companies they controlled. People on this thread need to get some factual background on Russia and Putin, before they accept any of the pompous, patronising opinionated, unsubstantiated, drivel that they will get bombarded with on this thread.

Larry - Putin with his cliched weaponizing of gas supplies, halting shipments to Austria.

At least the market has been weird enough to enable Shell's SP to go up a few notches after it goes Ex-dividend. Pleased to have seen Shell through Ex-dividend without selling, but I think my policy for the New Year will have to be thinking the situation through, reaching a rationalised conclusion, then do the opposite. Oh! and checking what LA is up to as well!

For anyone interested in developing a more realistic view of Putin, modern Russia and what is more likely to happen with BP's Rosneft stake, it is well worth reading Catherine Belton's:

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

John Sweeney - Killer in the Kremlin

Bill Browder's - Red Notice

David85,

A moron with financial qualification and two degrees, one a Masters degree! How are you doing? I bet you can drink without using a scoop cup by now!

In fairness you certainly write a lot in the 2-minute toilet break you are allowed at the call centre for Tena Pad customer services!

This is actually a JV that is going in all likelihood to produce tens of million dollars, as a minimum in CAPEX, profit-sharing etc etc. Nobody will be looking around the table seeing which party is going to be willing to pay a big bill to say Bacton oil terminal. Legally every aspect will be stitched up as tight as a drum.

Think about it, if it was your money what would you do? How could Shell sell out to Viaro, if what they owned was not legally defined with crystal clarity! What would they be selling.

So geniuses what would your pay and remuneration package be for say Andrew Nunn. It has been stated that you think £120,000 is too much! Are you thinking about basic pay of say £40,000 pa plus performance/success/SP related elements, taking him to what level? So what basic pay would you be looking at to attract a better CEO?

I assume you are not talking about attracting an ex-supervisor from a fast-food restaurant, or a zero hours, or minimum wage street-cleaner. Although from the general level of the posts I am not really sure!

When writing the background Job Spec are you wanting someone capable of doing the job in terms of work history? Do you want someone who has a rudimentary grip of topography/geology? Do you want someone who has relevant qualifications? Do you want to attract someone able to work in other countries i.e. maybe even speaking, or having a working knowledge of certain languages? Do you need someone who's health will stand up to certain environments? Do you want someone who has ever attained anything in their lives? Do you want someone respected in the industry? Or, someone who has never attained anything at all. A situation which you are probably all too familiar with!

If discovering a couple of gas/oil fields in the North Sea that were overlooked for decades, and one is the biggest gas discovery in the NS of the last decade, represents failure! What are your specific criteria for success?

Happy,

I don't agree that you might be hopelessly wrong & there is no doubt that merger talks with Shell (and others) have taken place already with the object of releasing value. Taking into account the Regulator, politics, Competition Commission etc etc it is the more seamless & smooth option. The Board would be failing in their fiduciary duty if they did not look at this option.

The funniest aspect is that discussions will also have taken place, or at least been sounded out, with the government. In a theatrical sense just imagine one of the world's elite business managers in the shape of Wael Sawan discussing anything more important than how to eat his next sandwich with Ed Milliband! One of them will clearly be way out of his depth.

DP - apologies for the lag in replying.

It is simply not feasible that Selene and Pensacola were negotiated separately with the Usual Suspects involved in both negotiations. With Deltic costs are carried until the end of this year on Selene, and the FID will be signed off, in 1-2 years time. Deltic will negotiate an exit with real value to be unlocked & as you say the most sensible choices of buyers will be Shell/Viaro and Dana.

Deltic's future after Milliband's obliteration of its North Sea centric business plan, looks like involving a substantial injection of capital from selling its Selene stake, transforming its burn runway, and then the world has to be its oyster. They are building a reputation for successful discovery of oil and gas, plus their JV partners Shell and Dana may be happy to work with Deltic again, and may even have agreed something looking ahead based on their worldwide portfolio of interests.

None of us are likely to get any idea of the current JV financial arrangements. They will simply be commercial in confidence with appropriate gagging clauses. There are thousands of variations of JV's, covering literally any area of business - marketing, production, licensing, technology, capital funding etc the list is endless. If it is seen that Nunn is the oilman behind the discoveries, although he is no spring chicken, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a JV or even takeover might be used to obtain the services of a particular individual. There is a glimmer of hope with Deltic, but don't put your life savings on it!

Spike & Exploration,

In the interests of extending your threadbare knowledge of some of the terms you glibly use. It is worth you noting in the following article that Deltic Energy states it is in a JV with Shell & Dana in relation to Selene:

https://www.rigzone.com/news/deltic_confirms_gas_in_north_seas_selene_prospect-05-nov-2024-178623-article/

Inventing statements that have no knowledge -base does no help to inform anyone on this thread.

LA - the best Shell trade of the year, so very well done. I hesitated on selling in the £28's, mainly because I would have taken a small loss on my buying price, but the treasure chest opened when they fell to £24 - I hadn't envisaged them dropping that far! Part of the problem is that I have become really relaxed with Sawan running Shell, for me he has hardly put a foot wrong. I even think he sold off the Permian interests so that it removed one of the many overlaps when he has a tilt at BP, which must be a major temptation.

I am going for the comfort blanket of dividends with Shell on this one and have already done so with BP. I don't think it will be a smooth ride down with the OP between now and March. Trump seems to have rattled a sabre in China's direction probably trying to derail their stimulus measures, stoked up US economic Xenophobia generally, at the same point as the lag effect of reducing interest rates/inflation rates might start to take effect soon, the war between Iran and Israel will imminently blow dramatically to a level that will disrupt oil supplies & spike the OP.

The budget was so bad I don't know where to start. Hitting farm estates over £1m with IHT etc. Might be worth looking at Woodlands Relief Tax Guidance - certainly you used to obtain tax advantages by buying rough ground unsuitable for crops, planting it with trees, the kids inherit it at low value, partly grown trees are not worth a fortune in terms of saleability, then you wait 30-years & at the age of 95 your plot of land is worth a lot more! Lifetime gifts over a 7-year period are still good but require longevity and a lot of trust in the benefactors!

Nice problems to have though! Good luck with your trading.

LA - good to hear from you. looks like you are still collecting the dividends - are you trading as much though? I decided to wait until the US election was out of the way as it seemed to be distorting the oil market, with the US pressing down on refinery margins, maximising oil output, hedge funds and investment banks shorting the oil price etc. Although with Trump I think we will have a lot of anyone's guess moments!

I bought a decent number of BP shares on the 18th October, at a fraction under £4/share, something is surely going to give at this level. NeverSellShell seems to have defected to the BP board, and Boyo is wasting his undoubted talents on Ocado!

Boohoo!

Rest assured the big institutional shareholders have been pressurising the BP Board for some time now, otherwise they would not have been doing their job.

My real interest in BP goes back to Looney's "cash machine" press statements, against a background of post-COVID governments desperately wanting to raise taxes. Really, along with numerous other examples, a leader at the top of his ego rather than top of his game!

Auchinloss, came in with Amoco in 1998 as far as I know, so a bit of a displaced lifer with BP! Interim CEO since September 2023, from the BP website, "BP’s board has undertaken a thorough and highly competitive process to identify BP’s next CEO." Oh! really! With the top talent in the world beating a path to their door, and consultants advising that they needed to head-hunt, as the best people available were out there holding similar positions with their competitors, they took the time from Looney leaving through until the 17th January 2024 to appoint Auchinloss.

The justification would be that after the chaotic Looney years, BP needed a safe pair of hands, someone who would not rock the boat, knew the company well etc! They got what looks like a journeyman, same old same old, even trying to curry favour with investors by upping the dividend and paying for it with debt! The road to rack and ruin!

What they needed was someone charismatic & driven, who would hit the ground running, sharply re-focus company strategy, dismiss half the Board so that they controlled the remainder directionally, hold a beauty parade for PR and Ad agencies, & hold press and Institutional shareholder briefings, to exude/build confidence and move forward with invigorated vision. Murray had to demonstrate that there was no more Mr Nice Guy, and that he was going to make an omelette and had no care about breaking eggs to do so! I have not seen any sign of any of this happening.

I bought the majority of my BP shares on the 18th October 2024. I am not an income investor, but the Christmas dividend bonus will cushion me keeping the shares for a few months. My view is that as Happy states something has to give, triple witching hour is almost on us, one way or another Murray will not make it through to the "big" strategy reveal in February, the impossible oil company role of Strategy & Sustainability Director will be consigned to the dustbin of history & if I am wrong so will my relatively speculative BP shareholding!

In a Trump administration you might find that economists are lower down in the decision making hierarchy than you imagine!

A great deal of noise already surrounds Trump: will the Mexican wall be finished, will Mexico build and pay for it, will he deport millions of illegals! Will he still stack top-secret US documents high in the washrooms of his Mar E Lago Estate in Florida!

It seems the war in Ukraine is as good as over. All Trump needs to do is convince Zelensky that Crimea is lost for good, along with massive swathes of Ukraine's industrial heartlands. So that should be easy enough, just forget the millions of casualties & displaced communities, the millions of Ukrainians starved to death during Stalin's Holodomor, the reduction of a European buffer-zone etc & everything is sorted.

If Trump introduces a 20% tariff on world imports to the US and a 60% tariff on Chinese goods, basic economics dictates that US citizens buy less Chinese goods, spend more on US goods making Musk happy etc.

But there is more to the tariff situation. In January 2024 the Fed announced that China held just under $800 billion in US securities. The merry go round has been that US citizens overspend using debt, the government issues US Treasury Bonds to cover the deficit, the Chinese buy a lot of them, and the US carries on buying a lots of Chinese manufactured goods. So everybody is happy, but at some point the virtuous circle, that enables the Chinese to have a sizeable (but in recent years reduced) grip on the lifestyle of Americans has to be curtailed or stopped.

The difficulty with completing this seamlessly is along the lines of the US introduces tariffs against China, but do the Chinese then hit back by dumping Bonds and initiating a full blown Bond crisis, hitting the US and world economies hard! At the moment though a significant slice of the US Treasury Bonds held by the Chinese are high coupon so high return debt to hold to maturity, at a time of currently reducing inflation and interest rates.

Probably Trumps overarching strategic goal is to keep the US economy as the number 1 in the world, and he is threatening to hit the Chinese economy hard as they try to stimulate it!

The OP doesn't currently appear to be slavishly influenced by geopolitical tensions/confrontations/outright war in the middle-east. Traders & countries seem content in assuming that hostilities between Israel and Iran have abated, and there is enough surplus oil supply to keep prices subdued.

But this will change rapidly if there is any threat to supply that say takes out a large part, or all of Iran's contribution to world supply.

It probably is not a time to relax over middle-east developments. Israel has destroyed significant air defence targets particularly around Teheran along with reducing Iran's missile production capability. This paves the way for reducing their losses if/when they target Iran's nuclear facilities & probably their energy infrastructure.

Iran has threatened a heavy blow in the direction of Israel, and having launched two major multi-missile & drone attacks, together with smaller scale probing Hamas and Hezbollah missile attacks, has some measure of the strengths and weaknesses of Israel's Iron Dome defences, now reinforced by the US THAAD system.

Due to lack of accuracy & destructive results capability from say 1000 miles away in Iran, it seems likely that Iran will want to move its launch sites nearer to Israel & try to "swarm" the Israeli air defences so that more missiles and drones get through to their targets, more accurately.

It is no idle threat that Iran through the IRGC want to remove the state of Israel from the map & they are up against an Israeli state, led by the hardest of hard-liners (Netanyahu's brother Yonni was the youngest colonel in the IDF and killed in the raid on Idi Amin's Entebbe), backed by the US, that cannot afford to let Iran develop nuclear weapons, and is doctrinally opposed to letting Iran or its proxies threaten its citizens with impunity. Watch this space for an OP spike in my view.

The OP doesn't currently appear to be slavishly influenced by geopolitical tensions/confrontations/outright war in the middle-east. Traders & countries seem content in assuming that hostilities between Israel and Iran have abated, and there is enough surplus oil supply to keep prices subdued.

But this will change rapidly if there is any threat to supply that say takes out a large part, or all of Iran's contribution to world supply.

It probably is not a time to relax over middle-east developments. Israel has destroyed significant air defence targets particularly around Teheran along with reducing Iran's missile production capability. This paves the way for reducing their losses if/when they target Iran's nuclear facilities & probably their energy infrastructure.

Iran has threatened a heavy blow in the direction of Israel, and having launched two major multi-missile & drone attacks, together with smaller scale probing Hamas and Hezbollah missile attacks, has some measure of the strengths and weaknesses of Israel's Iron Dome defences, now reinforced by the US THAAD system.

Due to lack of accuracy & destructive results capability from say 1000 miles away in Iran, it seems likely that Iran will want to move its launch sites nearer to Israel & try to "swarm" the Israeli air defences so that more missiles and drones get through to their targets, more accurately.

It is no idle threat that Iran through the IRGC want to remove the state of Israel from the map & they are up against an Israeli state, led by the hardest of hard-liners (Netanyahu's brother Yonni was the youngest colonel in the IDF and killed in the raid on Idi Amin's Entebbe), backed by the US, that cannot afford to let Iran develop nuclear weapons, and is doctrinally opposed to letting Iran or its proxies threaten its citizens with impunity. Watch this space for an OP spike in my view.

Shell is committed to the divestment of 1000 filling stations over the next couple of years, or 500/annum, from what it has announced already. In context Shell has 12,500 filling stations so this is simply prudent, based on future usage etc. It also indicates that the overall plan is broadly to divest at least 500 a year, because this will take 25-years, and take them through to 2050, obviously it depends how many are suitable for going electric, which are the most costly to run, which ones are nearing the end of leases etc.

Thinking on, there is a great example of the confusion around strategic direction in job titles alone:

EVP Strategy, sustainability & ventures, Giulia Chierchia

The FT announced changes to BP's Executive Team & a couple of leavers (not a mass exodus or force for dramatic change) on the 18th April 2024.

But once the overall strategy supposedly changed to a focus on oil and gas, where does that leave Giulia Chierchia's job designation and responsibilities. Is she suddenly responsible for Oil & Gas, but only "sustainable" Oil & Gas projects? Is she suddenly responsible for dismantling many of the "sustainable" businesses that she has largely bought in the market, or at least advised on buying.

Without going into great detail her job looks to contain major responsibilities that are mutually exclusive in their complete incompatibility. No wonder the markets are confused.