Member Info for HeadInTheSand

@Nomlungu. You beat me to it. Regardless, this repeated and blatantly ramptastic falsehood needs calling out whenever it's rolled out by the cheerleaders.

Ocelot yet again being deliberately disingenuous this morning, I see. Here's the post.

"Debt funding offers received: £20m"

That is knowingly misleading. The facts are these:-

Allegedly 2 unconfirmed and noncommittal offers have been received for Poundland Gas funding, one for £8-9m and one for £11m. According to the company's own RNS of 22nd Feb, these two offers can clearly not both be taken up, because they're for the same thing.

So the truth of things is that the company has absolutely not "received debt funding offers" of £20 million. As things stand, it cannot access this alleged £20 million. What it claims have received is two mutually exclusive and unconfirmed offers, one being between £3 and £4 million short of what it says it needs and the other being £1 million short. If a) both offers exist and if b) both offers turn out to be concrete and confirmed, the company will need to choose one or the other. Not both.

The continual misrepresentation perpetrated by some of the cheerleaders in here is simply jaw-dropping in its bare-faced shamelessness. Seems to smack of desperation, no?

Just took another look at the ANGS results, since the nice pretty pdf is up on their website now.

Page 29 on that pdf shows the directors salaries awarded in FY 2020 compared to the year before... and there's a material typo in the figures. Last year the five stooges were earning £296k between them. This year - if you look at the total helpfully given - it states £415k between them. Except...

Add the five numbers up and you get a total of £450k yearly director salaries, not the £415k shown. (Was this a deliberate error or does nobody at this cack-handed outfit actually check anything? Also, Nomad, where art thou?)

So correction to my earlier post - for all the superlative work the ANGS BoD has done last year in terms of delivering value to the company's shareholders, the directors decided to award themselves an average pay increase of 52% (not the previously mentioned 40%, which was based on a typical ANGS typo).

Mind you, in terms of ANGS' long history of making numerical errors, this is a teensy one. It pales into insignificance against the eye-popping 400% undercall on what it would cost to see if Poundland Gas could be got up and running. So I suppose we should all be thankful for small mercies.

@DoneK, re those who some choose to call "trolls" (presumably solely on the basis that they hold an opinion, no matter how justified) and who others choose to call "realists" (on the exact same basis)...

There's a jaw-droppingly simple way for ANGS to get sentiment to u-turn. It's called "actually and for once delivering on previous assurances... to previously assured timescales... and at previously assured costs".

If ANGS does that, the so-called "trolls" won't have a leg to stand on - or the realists will need to re-evaluate.

Does someone want to let George and his BoD know about this shockingly innovative and wildly left-field suggested strategy? If they deliver on it, they might even justify their recent sizeable self-awarded pay increases...

I'm not sure that "promising" is the word I'd use. But let's take a quick look.

The one obvious high spot is the reduced running costs - as near as dammit halved from £4m to £2m.

However, before we all get too excited, this primarily revolves around simply not having the same amounts of cash to spend during FY 2020 on trying to get nebulous assets to a revenue-delivering status.

I do further note that the remuneration committee have been so impressed by the sterling work done by the ANGS BOD in delivering value to shareholders that it felt it appropriate to give George a 50% pay increase, to actually double Hollis' and Fernandes' annual salaries and to bung Buchanan a 15% annual pay rise. Only Paddy C seems to have been put on the naughty step, with an £8k per year reduction. The nett year-on-year increase on remaining directors' pay totals in excess of 40% - looks like I'm in the wrong job, then.

Leaving that to one side, the major elephant in the room remains of course the auditors' caveats around going concern. As is clearly stated in the accounts, if ANGS cannot secure substantial additional funding in an attempt to get Poundland Gas to production, there are serious doubts about its future viability - of course, to be fair, this is hardly new news. Similarly, the auditors are additionally careful to point out that the costs of any required future decommissioning/abandonment are not and simply cannot be known - and if these kick in at higher than guesstimated costs, again ANGS will be in a world of potentially unaffordable pain - however and again, most with any capability of objectivity know this already.

To sum up my opinion? Guess what... it's still Saltfleetby or bust. So show us the money, George - and simultaneously tell us how much it's cost to raise. Literally nothing else matters.

...or to put it more simply, George has claimed via RNS that there are two utterly uncommitted and sketchy offers. One that's £3 to £4 million short and a separate one that's £1 million short. If both even exist, it's a case of either/or - the company has made no claim whatsoever that both would be realisable together.

The spin that some quite deliberately try to put on this company in an attempt to hoodwink the unwary is breath-taking in its shamelessness...

Ocelot, that "totalling £20 million" statement of yours is disingenuous and misleading in the extreme. So much so that one could justifiably assume that you're on either the ANGS or the Flagstaff payroll. This is at least the second time that this arrant misrepresentation has needed to be corrected.

If - and with George's track record on delivering on RNSed assurances, that's a pretty massive if - the Feb 22nd financing update RNS is to be believed as accurate, ANGS has received a "best efforts expression of commitment" of between £8 &£9 million towards the Poundland Gas unforeseen £12 million shortfall. The self-same RNS further claims that the company has received "indications and soft commitments" of £11 million... BUT FOR THE SAME USAGE.

Ignoring the fact that the chosen language clearly demonstrates that both financing "offers" are still hypothetical, what is crystal clear is that they cannot be aggregated, because they're for the same usage.

Please stop being so misleading. There is no £20 million on the table. Not even George Christian Andersen Lucan has made such a claim.

You're surprisingly trusting then, ocelot.

If you are right, given how repeatedly wrong George and his BoD have been, I'll offer 3 possibilities:

George is either:

Crushingly naive and inexperienced
and/or
Serially incompetent
and/or
Unbelievably and consistently unlucky.

If however your faith is misplaced, other possibilities arise.

GL and his assurances of things being "simple"...

Wasn't Poundland Gas just a simple matter of "turning the taps on", according to his lordship? Meanwhile a year's worth of unexpected delays later and with an utterly unforeseen£12 million funding shortfall...

Strikes me that things never turn out to be anything like as simple as George likes to make out.

Nhawan I only wish I was short on ANGS - I'd be minted. Sadly, I and I'd bet nobody else is short here... just stuck trying to get out without too painful a loss.

The overused "band of evil shorters" trope is just another myth always trotted out in circumstances such as these by the uberpositive in a futile attempt to explain away less than positive opinion. Sadly the latter are instead based on the cold and hard reality of things.

So now people's chosen BB IDs are subject to criticism? Seriously? Is that all that's left?

However, just for fun, let's take that ball and run with it. Ocelot, when are you going to change your LSE ID to "Unswerving faithful cheerleader in the face of all the fast-mounting evidence, for some increasingly bizarre reason"?

It's laughable the way some here try to point to the lack of an RNS being in any way an assurance that all is well within the ANGS circus.

Let me ask a simple question... looking back at any number of previously issued ANGS RNSes, just how many, pray tell, contained information that turned out to be in any way accurate? For example, has ANGS ever got anywhere near hitting a schedule that it has mentioned in any RNS? Answers on a (microscopic) postcard, please...

To my mind, with the recent frantic flurry of deflection attempts from George, he and his BoD almost certainly know that, far from being the game-changing and quickly revenue-generating jewel in the crown that they assured investors it was (NB via RNS), Poundland Gas has instead turned out to be the company's latest cowpat on the shoe.

Make that gkb instead of Bob... the rest's spot on, though

Bob, that's an assessment with which I entirely concur.

The trouble with any "Emperor's new clothes" outfit- as ANGS surely is - is that eventually harsh realities prevent the facade from being maintained any more. As I said yesterday in a mysteriously deleted post, some here are finally starting to wake up and smell the nastily bitter coffee.

However - and even leaving aside the more obviously agenda-ed - there are still a valiant few clutching their long-term confirmation bias to themselves like an ever-increasingly threadbare comfort blanket.

No mention during yesterday's frankly embarrassing open mike gig of how "no win, still fee" Aleph is doing with finding any mugs prepared to lend this cavalcade of clowns anything at all. I wonder if they've been paid their "reasonable" fees yet?

From a cash point of view, ANGS must be yet again running on fumes. I wonder what that's most likely to mean... again?

I'm sorry to say that the most likely reason for George to be bigging up Lidsey (again) is because he knows all is decidedly iffy at Poundland Gas. Either "no win, still fee" Aleph can't dredge up anyone prepared to lend this shower anywhere near what they need, or there are problems with the field's commerciality. Or both.

Agree that the level of downside SP movement on on the back of the oh so obvious Balcombe planning refusal would seem to be an over-reaction. I'll throw my opinion in again that planning being refused is easily viewable as no bad thing. Or should be.

A significant cause of this over-reaction has without a doubt been the ANGS BoD itself. If it hadn't issued that frankly ludicrous rainbow-filled investor presentation, fervently talking up the alleged opportunities in re-engagement with Balcombe, Lidsey and Brockham (let alone the "let's drill big expensive holes in Cornwall" never-never project), then my feeling is that the market wouldn't have been that bothered at all about what was a clearly telegraphed no vote.I mean, pretty much everyone with an IQ bigger than their shoe size has known without doubt for many months that quite literally the ONLY thing that makes any sense for ANGS to attempt is to deliver on Poundland Gas.

So bizarre was that "investor presentation" document that my biggest concern remains the actual motivation behind George's sudden "straight out of left field" efforts to puff up the potential of the very evidently cash-starved ANGS outfit on the back of four extra projects... not one of which it has a snowball's hope in the tropics of affording. Why would anyone think this was a good idea? Puff up Balcombe (inter alia) as an allegedly viable prospect (yet again), just before a planning meeting, where there was a more than even money chance of refusal? Madness...

No wonder planning refusal has caused an SP dip, then. That's what happens when a BoD deliberately attempts to attach significance to an "asset" that is actually - currently at least - valueless and entirely irrelevant.

Paddy Clanwilliam has a track record of shooting himself in the hand - it looks like George unfortunately has very similar tendencies, except it's his own foot that he's shot himself in.

gkb, the art of brutal pragmatism applies here, surely?

As one saying goes, "we are where we are"... so there's no point dwelling any more on the tens of millions of investors' hard-earned pounds that ANGS and its ilk have wasted (hopefully unknowingly) chasing the Weald oil fairytale.

As as for Poundland Gas? As another more appropriate saying goes "It may not be much... but it's all they got."

Crocqman talking arrant common sense yet again... as is his habit.

Regardless of any SP moves as a result of what was a foregone conclusion of a vote today, this is not bad news for ANGS - presuming that all is as well as can be reasonably expected regarding Saltfleetby. No more chasing rainbows, George... fercrissakes focus on the only potentially commercial job in hand.

Well, with ongoing radio silence about anything in the least confirmed from the "no win, still fee" outfit, it's certainly by now any port in a storm...

Some of us have been saying that for weeks, but many here have been effectively claiming that Balcombe was low-hanging fruit. Glad to see that at least a little common sense seems to be dawning, finally. Either that, or the cheerleaders have just had to rapidly scribble a new hymn sheet in the face of reality.

ANGS remains as it obviously has done for many months a one trick pony - Saltfleetby or bust.