George Frangeskides, Chairman at ALBA, explains why the Pilbara Lithium option ‘was too good to miss’. Watch the video here.
But our Helium 1 stake is just an equity stake. We do not hold any of the licenses. In fact, we are no different to any of the posters on here - just on a larger scale. It has a value if it goes up, but only if we sell it.
cperkin - sorry to interrupt your conversation but I am not quite sure what you are saying. Are you saying that the value of the H1 holing will free carry us for Ruvuma of have I completely misunderstood you?
ArielArrow - glad to you admit that it is not your board, but I am afraid that you do not always post the truth do you?
For example, you posted earlier today when you stated that the only reason that Fitzpatrick had not purchased more shares in over a year was because he was "not allowed to". This is not the truth is it? It is an outright lie, the only question being whether it is a lie born of your own incompetence or a deliberate attempt to mislead others. Either way it reflects very badly on your research or your character.
Cperkin - thankyou for your very civil response. I do not agree with it, but it is New Year's Eve and we can pick this conversation up in 2021. I genuinely hope that you and yours have an enjoyable celebration tonight and a very happy and healthy 2021.
Cperkin, just like Ariel Arrow, you are posting falsehoods and having then masquerading as facts and I will not apologise to you for pointing this out. Ruvuma IS NOT fully funded and the company’s own statements makes this clear. No amount of you claiming anything different will make this fact change.
1. The funding required for Ruvuma in 2021 is between US$22.8 million as stated in the recent Aminex RNS and $40 million as stated in the Aminex annual report.
2. This means that the Scirocco share of this is between $5,700,000 and $10,000,000 which will be required in short order.
3. The company has said that it currently has $3.6 million in cash and near-term equivalents and also has access to another $1 million which means that they have $4.6 million available.
4. They have then said that they have access to “a further undrawn US$3 million UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS”. This makes it very clear that they do not have access to this funding now.
5. In conclusion, they state in their own words that they currently only have $4.6 million available at this point in time so they are $1.1 million short o f the minimum cost of the drill and $5.4 million short of the higher end.
6. If they can access the additional $3 million (and there is a very real risk that they may not be able to be because this will be linked to the volume of shares traded which at the moment is very small) then they will have $7.5 million available less a minimum of “£500k excluding exceptional expenses and contingencies” (US$700,000) corporate expenses = $6.8 million.
7. $6.8million available would allow Scirocco to limp over the line at the smaller price as long as there was no increase in costs and assuming that they were able to access the additional $3 million which they admit is not available at the moment. However, it would still leave them $3.2 million short of the higher end figure.
In short, by the company’s own admittance in the RNS today they are NOT fully funded for Rumuva next year and require the following things to happen for them to cover the costs:
a) The cost of the works needs to remain at the bottom end estimate and not increase at all.
b) Their corporate costs need to remain at their most recent estimate of £500k as opposed to the £2.5 million that they were in the last set of financial accounts. They also need to not incur what they call any “exceptional expenses and contingencies” whatever they are.
c) They need to achieve whatever mysterious criteria they are not currently achieving in order to access the additional US$3 million of incredible dilutive funding.
These are just facts in the company’s own words. As of where we stand today the company are NOT FULLY FUNDED FOR RUMUVA under any criteria.
Ariel Arrow, earlier today you were claiming to another poster that the only reason Fitzpatrick has not bought more shares in Scirocco / Solo is because he "has not been allowed to since August 2019". This is clearly a lie and one in which you were caught out.
Stating this is not a personal attack, it is just a fact. This is not your board and you do not get to make up lies without me calling you out on them both now and in the future. Get used to it.
mrc - he won't answer because he is a board stooge. The same way that he is totally ignoring the post I put up before Christmas and today explaining how, despite his lies, we are a long way from being fully funded from Ruvuma.
The irony is he is now crowing about Helium 1 being fully funded for their drills which is great for our 12% holding but is embarrassing in that is just shows how a decent board can actually get things done - unlike the one we have here..
The facts show that the less our board have to do with a project the more likely it is to succeed.
But the drilling is not fully funded and as things stand SCIR do not have enough money to hold onto their 25% share of ruvuma.
I pointed this out to you pre-christmas cperkins but you seem to be ignoring facts in your desperate ramps so here it is again:
Even with the PB/Bergen facility the company has only got two thirds of the money it will imminently require to cover the costs of the amended work programme.
This work programme has already been significantly reduced from the budget that Aminex proposed in the chairman’s statement from the annual report of April this year where they said that they had a “budget of approximately $40 million for Ruvuma PSA. The programme includes the drilling of the Chikumbi-1 well and the acquisition of an extensive 3D and 2D seismic survey over the Mtwara Licence”. This would have meant that Scirocco’s share would have been $10 million. The discrepancy in the two budgets does also suggest that $22.8 million is not going to be enough and the costs are likely to increase and possibly almost double.
However, even if the costs remain at only $5.7 million, we still don’t have enough money for them. We have administrative expenses of £2.5 million per year (according to the last annual report) which means costs going out of over £200,000 per month and this will also have to come out of the $4 million…
It is all well and good being bullish on the value of Ruvuma but we have to be realistic about things as well. Having access to a drawdown facility of $4 million is absolutely no good when you have £200,000 per month going out of the company on paying fees to the directors and their companies and $5.7 million required in short order to keep hold of your asset.
I am not anti-Scirocco but we need to be realistic about the situation that we are in and pretending everything is fine when it quite clearly isn't does not help anybody.
Why are we paying Gneiss Energy between £500k and £1 milllion a year to arrange “funding” for Scirocco when they are constantly delivering nothing and charging us a massive premium for it? As was pointed out by highlandmatt last week with Fitzpatrick and Gneiss Energy “we pay a director who then outsources his work to his own company at a much increased fee. “
The board cheerleaders here bang on about Gneiss Energy being experts at delivering funding to oil companies but so far they have delivered nothing here except rubbish death spiral funding that does not even deliver enough money to cover our obligations re Ruvuma.
As others have said here today we are going to have to sell Ruvuma as we cannot afford to keep it and the money that we get from it is likely to be less than we have already put in.
This board of directors look like they are simply asset stripping the company and paying themselves vast amounts of money for doing so. The worst thing is that they are not even doing it pro-actively, they are just hoping that someone comes on with an offer and they will take whatever they can get as they are incapable of doing a deal.
Ruvuma is a world class asset but are we as shareholders going to benefit from it under this current group of blood suckers? They won’t get top dollar for it anyway and whatever they do get will be swallowed up in fees from Gneiss Energy and the directors. How much are they going to take in fees from any money we get from selling Ruvuma? 50%? More?
We didn’t benefit from the Horse Hill money did we? That all went straight into their pockets. What on earth makes you think that it will be any different this time?
Alistair Ferguson at first glance looks like exactly the sort of man that we would want on board with all his BP experience but actually he seems a bit of a paper tiger. There are many of his sort around, they look competent enough when working alongside all of the firepower of a supermajor but he was only ever really middle-management at BP and so when they are on their own in a small cap they are bereft of ideas. Really he is just a standard non-exec type who companies appoint to their boards to make them look good but without expecting them to do anything. He had a pop at the executive role, totally screwed up the One Dyas deal and is now not interested in taking Scirocco any further forward in my opinion.
Don Nicolson is a wholly unnecessary appointment. He was appointed in November 2019 by Alistair Ferguson because “his experience at BP will be highly beneficial to the company as we further develop the Dutch North Sea assets that we are in the process of acquiring” (from One Dyas) but now that the acquisition of these assets ended in disaster it seems a totally redundant role.
So in total the company has two executive directors -one of which is part time (and this is the CEO for Christ’s sake) while the other is not even a company employee but instead is an employee of one of the non-executive directors who pays him out of the £750,000 his services company charges Scirocco per annum.
Then we have three non-executive directors, one of whom was brought on board specifically to develop the assets of a deal that never went ahead and the other two who have been rinsing money out of the company for years in wages and consultancy fees. They are also the two puppet masters to whom everybody else reports.
Can you really see a company run by this lot actually acquiring new assets and developing any real value going forward? I can’t, but I hope that somebody can explain to me why I am wrong.
Fingers crossed...
Fingers crossed it hints at good news for us.
I have now got a small shareholding here, also paid for with profits from trading the movements over last months rise. Will continue to trade and add more with the profits.
If there is one thing that politicians really hate it is taking decisions for which they may later be held responsible. They will always take any chance that they can to delay them, hand them off or (best still) blame them on other people as they are "guided by the experts".
Steve, I agree that the only thing that matters is what they can achieve here, but I think that their past performance provides a very good guide to what they are likely to do. Leopards don't change their spots, which is why insurance companies look at your driving history before they decide your premiums. If you have had lots of accidents in the past and are not a sensible driver then they assume that this pattern of behaviour will continue in the future.
Personally, I think that this is especially true in the corporate world. If you look at people like Lenigas for instance, who is an appropriate comparison for Solo, then you see that for all his (many) faults the man consistently has the ability to find a good prospective resource, put it in a vehicle and get the share price going up. Yes, it never lasts but in 2011 for example he brought the share price here up by nearly four times over the course of four months and he has pulled off the same trick at many other companies.
The point being , if you follow Lenigas at the beginning of his tenure in a company when he first vends in an asset then you normally stand to make good money. With Ferguson there has never been any rise or upside If you look at the share price performance at JKX it was down all the way from when he joined and it was a pretty similar story at Zoltav. It is also what has happened here.
I’m going to look into Fitzpatrick and Nicholson anyway and see if I can find any positive signs that might break this pattern. You never know, there may be some that will give me some hope for a better performance here in the future.
Steve, I spent a couple of hours last night looking into Tom Reynolds’ previous appointments and it appears more of the same to Alistair Ferguson really. He has had one mild success, with a 36% value increase, one total wipeout for a 100% loss for shareholders and one 63% loss.
I’ll try and look into Fitzpatrick and Nicolson tonight, but in the meantime details on Reynolds are below.
Back between March 2010 and November 2013 he launched Bridge Energy to AIM in September 2012 at a price of 118p and then 14 months later in November 2013 it was sold to Spike Exploration for 162p (a 36.7% increase on the original listing price over 14 months). To be honest it is hardly and earth-shattering amount to money to increase the share price by but at least it didn’t lose money for investors.
Investors at Canadian listed Inoa Energy where he was CEO and President from Sept 2014 to Jan 2016 were not as fortunate. When he joined on September 2nd 2014 the share price was CAD$0.395 but by the time trading was suspended on November 20th 2015 it was down to CAD$0.005 (a loss of 98.8% of its value) and in Jan 2016 it went into administration – wiping out all of its shareholders with a 100% loss.
On April 23rd 2019 he was appointed non-executive director to Zephyr Energy (which was then called Rose Petroleum). Share price on April 23rd was 1.625p and October 7th the price was 0.6050p so it has dropped by 63%.
it's bordering on criminal. They do not give a damn about shareholders or company value just as long as they keep the fees rolling in.
I'll do that. Will get back to you as soon as I have something.
The directors here are a disaster. Under their watch the share price has declined from 3.25p when Fitzpatrick joined the board on May 2nd 2018 down to 0.95p today losing over 70% of it’s value.
I’m not sure why I am in any way surprised though. Now I have researched Ferguson’s performance at his previous companies it seems clear that losing money for shareholders, while lining his own pocket with massive pay cheques is just what he does.
At JKX Oil & Gas the share price was 164p when he a joined as a non-exec in October 2011 and 25.75p when he left (or perhaps more accurately was asked to leave along with all his fellow directors after an EGM) in Jan 2016. This meant under his tenure JKX lost 84.3% of it’s value.
At Zoltav Resources where he was chairman from December 2014 to September 2016 the share price was 111.5p when he arrived and 24p when he left meaning that it lost 78.5% of its value.
So unfortunately it seems like we may have a fair bit further to fall for Ferguson to continue his history of losing about 80% of the share price value from any project that he is involved in.
They didn't sell Horse Hill or PEDL331 either - these were both done by Dan Maling while he was still in his role of Managing Director.
As far as I can tell the only thing that the current directors have done is pay themselves a lot of money and massively increase the administrative expenses.
************* published this piece yesterday about Block Energy. However, given Ferguson's TR1 announced by Block on 16th Sept and Fitzpatrick's from Aug 20th it does seem as if they are part of Nigel Somerville called “the rebel alliance”.
It has a lot of similarities as to how Ferguson and Fitzpatrick ended up in control here if you ask me….
Block Energy – rebel alliance appeased….for now
AIM-listed Block Energy (BLOE) seems to have made a pretty decent effort at addressing the problems I raised HERE. On Thursday, an RNS appeared which seems a pretty good overview of where things are and announced the departure from the board of NED and former technical director, Mr Roger McMechan…
The full text of the RNS is HERE but the main point seems to be that things are progressing despite the difficulties presented by Covid-19, and the corporate governance issues appear to be being dealt with. All good – pleased to be of service!
We are told that half year results will be issued by Wednesday of this week (deadline day), at which point the grizzly truth about how much cash is left will become clearer. My suspicion is that all might not be well in that department, but we are told that crude oil production from West Rustavi, Norio and Satskhensi brought in net $570,000 in August, so perhaps my fears are unfounded. The problem is that we don’t know figures from July and before, and oil sales are one thing but cashflow is another. We shall see.
But on the whole, it does look as though the board has tried to address the issues raised and for that we should be thankful. Why it has taken until now is another matter, but my source suggests that the rebels, who control 20% of the shares, have been placated for now.
But the board also knows that one false move from now on will see forced change. Let us hope it does not come to that (even if the beer and popcorn would be a good diversion!), but as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or, rather, delivery on promises made.
Roll on the interims!