Charles Jillings, CEO of Utilico, energized by strong economic momentum across Latin America. Watch the video here.
AJW - could you get in touch with me when you have time. I have an idea I want to run by you. Email can be found here: https://twitter.com/Only1Holyroller - Thanks.
The proposals in their second requisition are very interesting. As has been said here it smacks of spite that they know that they are going to be defeated in their attempt at seizing control of the company via an executive takeover.
It also shows how little they care about anything but getting control of the company as an audit of that scale conducted by one of the big four accountancy firms will probably cost about £500,000. This is shareholders money and they have no right to demand that it is spent how they want. But it gives a good idea of how free and easy they would be with our money if they managed to get their fangs into Block. I imagine the advisory fees being a lot more than £1.5 million over three years here.
Again, we should reject every proposal that GP Jersey make - not because there are not some legitimate concerns in there but because it is clearly still part of their tactic of taking over the company on the cheap.
As investverysmart has pointed out, I am trying to organise an off-board resistance to GP Jersey – not least because I don’t think that it does any good for us to let them know how many shares that they have against them.
No pressure, but if anyone does want to get in touch the email is on twitter: https://twitter.com/Only1Holyroller
I have also been doing some digging into GP Jersey over this weekend and nothing I have found shows that they are in this for anything other than their own enrichment. I have another evening or so worth of cross checking to do and then I will put my research up here. I will also post it on Twitter as there seems to be a real clamp down on posting anything negative about the Scottish contingent and their allies on this board.
Hepseal –
1) I have no idea how Valeschini got onto the board in the first place. I guess that at the time of his appointment then relationships between the current board and the Scottish contingent were not so bad and they didn’t mind the connection. It was a dumb move though, as somebody said on here before – never invite the vampires into your house!
The connection between Valeschini and the Scottish contingent is pretty transparent. Not only are they pushing Valeschini for Chairman but he has a long history with Alistair Ferguson going back to when both were at TNK-BP over 10 years ago. Just check their CVs https://www.jkx.co.uk/investor-centre/our-board-of-directors#charles-valceschini and https://www.linkedin.com/in/alastair-ferguson-839b4b140/
2) In my opinion the explanation for the other board members to leave the company now is to do with the battle that they know is coming up. I guess that they just don’t want to get their reputations caught in the crossfire. From what I can see in the annual report they get paid about £25k each a year for being a NED. They probably consider that it is just not worth being involved in a corporate ****storm for that little money. If you ask me it is certainly no coincidence that they have both quite just a few days before the EGM has to be announced (which is Monday I believe). That way, whatever happens now they can both say that it was nothing to do with them when they go for another appointment elsewhere. Logical move really.
The Block board is looking like the gunfight at the end of a western now with all of the NEDs having scuttled off into hiding and just leaving Haywood, McAvock and Dimmock to shoot it out with the Valeschini, GP Jersey, Jon Fitzpatrick and Alistair Ferguson.
With the departures of Chris Brown and David Sandroshvili all pretence that the EGM is about Philip Dimmock’s performance as chairman is clearly abandoned. The announcements make it public to the to the wider world what most of us here have known for some time - the EGM called by GP Jersey has never just been about Philip Dimmock and his performance but is rather about who runs the company going forwards.
All the non-affiliated NEDs have now left the building and like I said above, the showdown is coming.
We all have to choose whether we want the company to be run by GP Jersey, Gneiss Energy, Fitzpatrick and Ferguson or by the existing board and vote accordingly. Whoever wins this vote will control the chairmanship and now has a clean slate to appoint whoever they want to the board afterwards. The winners will simply appoint their own people to the board and then they will control the direction of the company.
It Haywood and the existing executives win then you can bet that Valeschini will be kicked straight out the door. If the Scottish contingent win then Haywood will get the boot equally quickly – and Gneiss Energy will almost certainly be appointed to help fill the void…
You know what I think – the Scottish contingent have shown exactly how they want to run a company with their stewardship of Solo/Scirocco. I am invested there are have first hand experience of how costly that has been to private investors. I believe that they and their outrageous fees must be kept out of Block at all costs or all potential shareholder value will simply disappear. I will vote against the GP Jersey motion and urge you all to do the same.
Hi Hepseal - Yes I wrote in March that I was a significant investor in Scirocco (and i still am). I also mentioned that:
"I am off back to my own investments now, but given what some of you have posted about the potential here I may have a bit of a deeper dive into researching Block and you never know I may return one day as a fellow shareholder."
I did become a shareholder in Block and I mentioned this in my post on July 6th about the future under a Valeschini regime (which has unfortunately been deleted) when I clarified that:
“We will just have to keep an eye on how much the administrative expense go up – and it is worth noting that with Solo that they have done every year since they took over by a minimum of 30% each year.I don’t know about the rest of you but this is not a future that I want for my investment in Block and consequently as (an admittedly small) shareholder will be voting against Valeschini.”
This is one of the many unfortunate things about deleting posts, it muddies waters that should otherwise have been clear.
To avoid confusion and for total clarity, my small holding in Block is slightly under 1.1 million shares.
Hepseal – may I what size your holding in Block is and how you intend to vote in the proposal put forwards by GP Jersey?
Hepseal - Apologies, PET was a typo. It should have read PREFERRED.
For clarification: the line in my 12.08 post should have read:
• 5/07/2021 – GP Jersey issue a request for a general meeting to fire Philip Dimmock and appoint their PREFERRED director Charles Valeschini as chairman. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/request-to-requisition-general-meeting-q08q1xx8r530ykl.html
As to your questions I would love to answer them but unfortunately since I am not allowed to voice an opinion on here any but only to state facts then I must decline for the moment. I will endeavour to provide suitable links that will enable readers here to draw their own conclusions as to what to think about Valeschini after the weekend.
In the meantime, all I can do is reiterate the fact that I truly believe that the GP Jersey proposal is very bad for shareholders in Block Energy and should be firmly rejected.
If one was conducting a normal takeover then it would certainly be the case that shareholders could expect the price of shares to rise as the potential buyer bid to purchase them. However, the clever thing about an executive takeover is that it is possible to take over a company without having to pay a premium on the shares.
The board of a company control what the company does so if you end up in control of the board then you end up in control of the company without having to make an offer for it. Of course, other shareholders could try and vote your directors out but if you had a group of people on your side with a fairly substantial holding (say about 15%) then, in practice, you could make getting rid of them practically impossible in real life.
To give a completely random example - control of Solo Oil passed from one group of directors to another group of directors back in mid 2018 and early 2019. There was no offer made to buy out the company via an offer to purchase company shares at a premium and in fact the share price declined from 3.6p in May 2018 to 1.6p in April 2019. Nonetheless, during this time every single director was replaced with a new one and a completely different board ended up in control of the company…
Block Energy – RNS releases
• 11/06/2018 - Gneiss Energy appointed placing agent and adviser to Block Energy https://gneiss.energy/news/page/11/
• 08/04/2019 – Alistair Ferguson issues TR1 announcing he owns 5.89% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/tr-1-notification-of-major-holdings-t4094pf2l0utyli.html
• 1/11/2019 – Jon Fitzpatrick buys a 3.8% stake https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/holdings-in-company-pdtfpa1tfo51myq.html
• 19/08/2020 – GP Jersey buys a 3% stake https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/tr-1-notification-of-major-holdings-replacement-dhtbiat102mqx59.html
• 31/12/2020 – Fitzpatrick increases his stake to 4.27% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/holdings-in-company-a7zfqli6oos55xh.html
• 09/4/2021 – GP Jersey increase stake to 5.02% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/tr-1-notification-of-major-holdings-kj1mnbqmkbyp2hv.html
• 30/06/2021 – A failed attempt is made to oust Phiip Dimmock at the AGM https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/result-of-agm-fjpvabf1mo6gbar.html
• 5/07/2021 – GP Jersey issue a request for a general meeting to fire Philip Dimmock and appoint their pet director Charles Valeschini as chairman. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/BLOE/request-to-requisition-general-meeting-q08q1xx8r530ykl.html
Angus Energy – RNS Releases
• 23/09/2020 – Angus engages Gneiss Energy to help raise £12 million debt. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/proposed-placing-and-proposed-debt-facility-7eumfqpy2wtl7dt.html
• 22/12/2020 – GP Jersey buy a 5.11% stake https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-tsfynx5iqmbsvjz.html
• 29/12/2020 – GP Jersey increase stake to 6.08% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-w9r9si5ro9iosdk.html
• 05/01/2020 - GP Jersey increase stake to 7.06% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-2rlch7ilj7lnhzt.html
• 6/1/2020 - GP Jersey increase stake to 8.04% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-a6c1rzkexr1ogus.html
• 25/01/2021 - GP Jersey increase stake to 9.00% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-ge3vgau5e0fi7f5.html
• 26/01/2021 - GP Jersey increase stake to 10.01% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-0839mz5lmgnpgvh.html
• 08/04/2021 - GP Jersey increase stake to 10.14% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ANGS/holdings-in-company-b3fgbd9052w1huq.html
Rose Petroleum (now Zephyr) RNS Releases
• 11/04/2019 – Gneiss Energy appointed strategic advisor to Rose Petroleum https://gneiss.energy/news/page/9/
• 23/04/2019 – Tom Reynolds (Scirocco director) appointed as non-exec. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ROSE/directorate-change-7r4kypeuwat0v32.html
• 10/07/2019 – Jon Fitzpatrick buys a 5% stake. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ROSE/holdings-in-company-0637jlqsdj8oe0g.html
• 14/11/2019 – GP Jersey buy a 6.47% stake https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/ROSE/holdings-in-company-rwnmdgqmh5vbgma.html
Since I am no longer allowed to voice an opinion on this board I am just going to state some facts that are in the pubic domain and let you all make of them what you will when you consider the abstract question about parties working together while pretending that they are not.
Solo/ Scirocco RNS releases
• 14/03/2018 – Jon Fitzpatrick issues TR1 for 3.67% at Solo https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/holdings-in-company-uln60i9gf3tzjsa.html
• 2/5/2018 – Jon Fitzpatrick appointed as non-exec director of Solo https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/director-changes-2pkg538px0i869r.html
• 6/8/2018 – Alistair Ferguson appointed chairman and Gneiss Energy appointed as corporate advisor https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/board-appointment-e1mbjqsjgovn86d.html and https://gneiss.energy/news/page/11/
• 8/8/18 – Ferguson buys 2.13% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/board-changes-and-directors-dealings-8bbc712hnorbrgc.html
• 14/9/2018 – Fitzpatrick increases his holding to 4.45% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/directorpdmr-shareholding-yglec1a7u3gsi4q.html
• 4/12/2018 – Tom Reynolds appointed as non-exec director. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/director-appointment-xu0hucl63hdhey0.html
• 14/7/2020– Ferguson ups stake to 3.76% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/holdings-in-company-jnyf0vhkm927sft.html
• 9/10/2020– GP Jersey buy 3.24% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/notification-of-major-holdings-tkgxcuknwemtedy.html
• 19/10/2020 – GP Jersey up stake to 8.51% https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SOLO/notification-of-major-holdings-2rhyecn2p8x8nif.html
• 16/11/2020– GP Jersey up stake to 9%. https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/SCIR/notification-of-major-holdings-k9a5mn7p79swfe7.html
On Tuesday 6th July I wrote a number of posts relating to the attempted executive takeover that has been in progress at Block Energy since the AGM. These detailed a number of the players who are behind this action and their track record of performance at other companies in which they are in control.
Later that day my posts, which were backed with evidence from the public record in company accounts and RNS releases were deleted and my account was suspended until today for posting “defamatory comment”. I am very unhappy about this and have no idea why it happened. The posts were researched in detail and substantiated with evidence taken from company annual reports, official company RNS releases and public news announcements.
It is clear to me that certain individuals involved in this corporate action do not want investors to know that they are associated with it and are monitoring this board and pressuring LSE to delete anything that does not portray them in the light that they would wish to be seen (or not be seen).
This is totally ridiculous. It is outright preventing us independently discussing what is clearly a major tipping point in the company’s future as while we can criticise the existing board with impunity, the moment that we write something that is not in favour of the proposed resolution and its allies then it appears to get deleted.
I have done significantly more research than I have posted on here so far but I feel that there is very little point in writing it up in post form if it is just going to be deleted because it is critical of those backing the corporate restructure.
As I have made very clear, I intend to vote firmly against the GP Jersey resolution. I have noticed this week that a substantial number of others seem to agree with this position. This being the case I would like to put together an organised group of likeminded (anti-GP Jersey) investors to vote against this resolution and to be able to discuss freely (without censorship) the implications of what may happen in the event of GP Jersey being successful in this resolution.
If you are interested in joining then please get in touch on twitter at https://twitter.com/Only1Holyroller or at: Againstgpjresolution (at) outlook (dot com).
Let's make sure that the futrure success of Block Energy will benefit all shareholders and not just a mysterious and powerful few. If my account gets suspended again then please contact me via email or social media.
Thanks you for all your kind comments. I hope that we at Scirocco can finally manage to extract the value that we deserve out of our Ruvuma asset and I hope for all of your sakes that Fitzpatrick and Ferguson don’t manage to get full control of your company the way that they did of ours.
Some of you mentioned about being worried that your directors were doing the same thing with Block and Plutus Strategies as Fitzpatrick does with SCIR and Gneiss. There is actually an easy way to find out.
The key part to look for when directors are really milking everything that they can out of a company is in the annual report under “related party transactions”. There are a myriad of ways for directors to hide things in an annual report but the “related party” section is pretty black and white and there is no excuse that they can offer to the regulators if they are caught ignoring it – so it is one place that they have to be truthful.
Any payments made to Plutus Strategies by Block would have to be declared in the annual report as a related party transaction. I have had a quick look at the 2017, 2018 and 2019 annual reports for Block to check for these. It was esay to do, I just searched for “Plutus”.
In the 2017 annual report it says that in March 2017 Plutus were paid £2,500 for consultancy fees and £20,000 for brokers fees as well as receiving 658,234 2.5p warrants in Block as part of the subscription for Taoudeni Resources.
In 2018 there were no related party transactions involving Plutus.
In the 2019 annual report is says that Plutus were paid 977,383 shares at 15p for a deferred consideration for the purchase of Taoudeni Resources. They said that this was covered by an explanation in the AIM admission document.
The short answer from my (very quick) look into the annual report is that Plutus were paid some fees in shares for a transaction that appeared to take place prior to Block’s listing on AIM. I assume that some of you lot will know what the Taoudeni Resources transaction was for and why Plutus got paid from it but Plutus have certainly not takien any ongoing fees for services to the company since it has listed. So they are by no means the same as Gneiss.
I am off back to my own investments now, but given what some of you have posted about the potential here I may have a bit of a deeper dive into researching Block and you never know I may return one day as a fellow shareholder. Until that day comes GLWYI.
Being a non-exec director of Scirocco has also been extremely lucrative for Fitzpatrick personally as he has taken out £196,000 in directors fees for 2018 and 2019. It should be noted that these are fees for being a non-exec director and as such they are incredibly high. To give an idea of what I mean by high, all three non-execs at Block put together were paid £132,525 ($182,167) for their fees for the 30 months between June 2017 to December 2019 and Fitzpatrick got paid nearly a third more than all three of them did put together for just two years work.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg really. On top of this there are questions about the amount of share options that the directors have issued themselves, the amount of company money they have wasted on their failed takeover attempts and the amount of debt that has been introduced to the company on their watch. This has even led to calls on the forums to try and organise an EGM to do something about it.
As I say, it is not really any of my business as I am not invested here, but I would seriously be careful what you wish for if you want to replace your existing management with the lot who run Scirocco. You may not think that things can get much worse but imagine if a new management team came in and started:
selling your existing assets without replacing them;
massively increasing the administration expenses;
bringing in their own private company to charge the company hundreds of thousands of pounds each year for unidentified “advisory services”;
racking the company up with debt;
being very vague about how you intend to pay for your share of costs for the development of your most valuable asset, potentially leaving you having to sell it for a discount.
You may just wish that you had stuck with the devil you know…
As a significant investor in Scirocco I occasionally come and look at this board since the two companies, unfortunately for both, share some significant investors in common. Last week I noticed a particular investors on this board mentioning that you think that you might be better off under new management and stating that he thought that “if the BOD and the scottish contingent had updated the market with the current news the sp would be flying. It isnt, its dying slowly and now under placing price.”.
I have not posted on the Block board to this point as I am not a shareholder here but before the idea takes hold that you would in any way be better off under the management of Alistair Ferguson and Jonathan Fitzpatrick, let me point out to you some of the things that have happened to Scirocco under their watch.
Since Fitzpatrick and Ferguson took over at Scirocco back in May 2018 they have managed to sell a significant chunk of the company’ assets, ramp up its debt and channel large amounts of company money out to Fitzpatrick’s advisory company Gneiss Energy. They have raised about £5 million from the asset sales but this all appears to have been used up and as of their last update in December 2020 it appears to have left Sciroccos without the money to fund their share of liabilities for the continued development of the Ruvuma asset even with the death spiral financing that they currently have in place with Bergen.
Since they took over Fitzpatrick & Ferguson have increased the amount of administrative expenses by £600k every year - from 2017 (pre-their control) when it was £1.2 million per year to 2018 when it was £1.9 million per year and by 2019 it was up to £2.5 million per year. God knows what they will be in 2020 when those results are released in a few months time.
The private company that Fitzpatrick owns with his wife, Gneiss Energy, has been paid £1.3 million in fees from Scirocco according to the 2018 and 2019 annual reports for what is described as “provision of management services” in 2018 and “provision of corporate finance advisory” in 2019. Despite at least one public request that I know of from Scirocco shareholders the company have refused to publicly say what these fees were for. One thing that we do know though is that on 31st October 2017 the only employees of Gneiss Energy were Fitzpatrick and his wife, but by 31st March 2019 there were 8 and by 31st March 2020 there were 11. So being in business with Solo/Scirocco has definitely been good for Gneiss Energy even if has not been so great for Scirocco.
I always said that Jonathan Fitzpatrick was a total liability whose only skill-set is bleeding the company dry through his awful Gneiss consultancy. What’s the betting that he was finally told that the conflict of interest was too great and he had to jump before he was pushed as the image of him taking a huge wage and also sucking vast amounts of cash out via via Gneiss became too much for even Ferguson to bear?
However, this is a just a powder-puff PR move. By him dropping off the board then this means that we no longer get to see Gneiss as a related party transaction in the annual accounts and that hides how much money the company is spending with Gneiss even more effectively.
Our next set of annual accounts will be out soon and I bet we will find that Gneiss have once again massively overcharged for their services and taken money out of Scirocco that the company can ill-afford to lose. This is probably why this has been done now – so this will be the last year that they have to face such a massive conflict of interest publicly.
Make no mistake though, as long as Gneiss are intimately embedded in the company and subbing their staff out to high ranking positions such as COO in Scirocco Fitzpatrick will almost certainly still be acting as a shadow director and pulling strings behind the scenes. His number one priority will definitely be to ensure that Gneiss are still milking every drop of profit out of Scirocco that they can as this is where he makes his real money. The £62,000 directors fees are nothing to him compared to the £500k-£750k that Gneiss bills Scirocco every year.
The only way that Scirocco will ever be truly free of Fitzpatrick and his money-grabbing ways is if we get the announcement that Gneiss no longer have anything to do with the company. Until then, the money will still be moving out of the company pockets and into Fitzpatrick’s.
But him going is a good start. Now we just need to get rid of Gneiss and bring on a new board who actually want to deliver value for shareholders rather than just themselves.
If we get an announcement that Gneiss are out soon too then I think that we may genuinely turn a corner in shareholder value and then I will open the champagne! However, him going is a baby-step towards a better future and I will definitely raise a small beer to his departure tonight.
As a new poster I want to be completely clear with existing holders. I am not currently invested in Zenith. I like the look of the Tilapia asset and I am looking at making a couple of investments into high risk small-cap companies to go alongside the more blue chip dividend payers and cryptocurrencies in my portfolio. However, what I have found is that it is never enough for a company to just have good assets - they also have to have a good and dedicated board of directors and the ability to fund their assets.. This is what I am researching in Zenith before taking the plunge into investing my money.
My main small cap holding is SCIR who have a fantastic asset in Ruvuma in Tanzania but it is run by an absolutely useless BoD who have no deal-making abilities, they lost millions on a failed gas deal. Since then they have just seemed to want to drain as much money as possible out of the company by charging sky-high directors fees and using private consultancies to charge millions in additional services fees. The company also cannot actually finance their 25% of Ruvuma even with the death-spiral financing that they have in place so it is likely that they are going to simply sell the asset for whatever they can get for it and then a lot of the profit will disappear into fees to “related companies”. It has been a bit of a disaster of an investment to be honest, but I have made good profits in my crypto investments and am hanging on in at SCIR because I do think that under a different board things could be different.
So for my next project I am looking for a company where the interests of the directors are aligned with the interest of the shareholders and where it is likely to be able to sensibly fund exploration activities without diluting shareholders too much. So far I like what I see of ZEN. I do not mind having a deal maker at the helm as I think that it is easier to get operational people on team than it is to get deal-makers. I also like the fact that Andrea Cattaneo spent four months in the Congo getting the Tilapia license renewed (I doubt the SCIR crew have been to Tanzania for more than a week in their lives) and I also like fact that they have $5.7 million owed to them which they can finance a new well with. I have a bit more research to do before parting with my money but but I do like what I see so far.
WRITE UP PART 6
So basically it is being in the right place at the right time when there are opportunities to take?
Absolutely. You have to remember that in recent years these opportunities were made available from Shell in Nigeria but the cost of purchasing these fields were around $200 million which would be an impossible financing burden for a junior oiler. Now, instead, these fields are even returned for free to the governments and the government needs to find an operator immediately because they are quite sizeable productions and not many operators are already accustomed and French speaking (as we are) to take these fields that are returned to the government.
Andrea – you mentioned that you are travelling back to the Congo soon. How long are you planning to spend in Africa for the operations but also to develop these relationships? Many CEOs don’t spend any time on site and in reality being on the ground is a key element for an energy company?
I hope that this interview is not seen by my family members but my view is that in this special period of opportunities and challenges then the answer should be “as long as it takes”. When I made my last visit to the Congo I arrived on September 1st and I planned to return long before Christmas. However, he construction of a proper settlement into the country’s roots of oil and gas and building relations has taken so long that I had to spend almost 4 months into the country.
It will be the same if we do something in Angola or other countries nearby. We will have a need to stay in the place and create a real network of relationships to build the credibility that can only be established with a physical meeting especially in a country that is as personal as Africa.
WRITE UP PART 5
Let’s talk about Tunisia – when will the two deals you have done receive regulatory approval?
This double transactions (as they are two stakes in the same field) may be approved at any time but the problem has been with the volatility within Tunisian politics. Various governments and ministries have been created and then dismissed and this has created a huge delay in the state body that should give the final stamp of approval. So we have no visibility except to say that our local advisor says that it could come through any day – but unfortunately this position has the same for the last three months and so we do not know exactly when it will happen. We do expect that it will be soon though as the political observers know that this delay creates a negative impact in the O&G development of the country which is very important for employment and GNP for a long-suffering country. Nevertheless Tunisia has been the darling of value for junior companies from abroad (Canada, England, Holland and Norway) as well as some state companies.
Can you tell us more about your JV agreement signed for the MNA region?
In 2021 Zenith plan to take advantage of the challenges that are coming out of Covid for major and mid-tier companies. Our vision at the start of 2020 has been fully confirmed by what is happening today as various majors are closing marginal fields (even fields that can do thousands of barrels per day) in Africa and elsewhere because of the constraints of Covid.
The system of a lot of the large companies is to use rotation of their managers who mainly come from North American and Europe. This rotation is done by flying every 28 days from the working site at the oil field into their residence in their countries. Now because of the Covid situation some of these people such as those from the UK and USA have tremendous difficulty in reaching their destination and their companies have to find substitutes. When these people come from centres of high Covid transmission then they need to go into quarantine which increases the rotation from 28 days to a paid rotation of 45 days or more. This both complicates and sometimes makes uneconomical the management of expensive fields for small quantities of oil. When I talk about small quantities I mean anything below 12,000 bopd. So this is a key of our policy – being near to majors like we have done with SLK and showing that we are very credible in delivering payment and making it easy for them to deliver to the new owner (us) of the property that they want to dispose of. All of that is a process that can have the ability to bring us to 18,000-20,000 bopd in 12-18 months.
The simple calculation is that if we only take two fields that average 8,000-9,000 bopd we will go to 16-18,000 bopd from 1,000bop and the difference will be huge in terms of market perception and market capitalisation. We are only one step from this level.