Hotcopper25 Mar 2015 10:54
? ASX - By Stock (Back) 18/03/15 18:10
http://hotcopper.com.au/threads/news-these-were-wednesday’s-most-traded-stocks-on-the-asx.2478963/page-18?post_id=14980291#.VRKRdBiQGrU
FirstPrev18NextLast
Profile
Follow
Schumacher
717 posts.
Date:
25/03/15
Time:
19:09:02
Post #:
14980291
IP:
118.92.xxx.xxx
Aside from the fact that Rob has left the building - think we are now heading in the right direction as these guys running the company needed to go and ring some new leadership on board which is having a positive effect on share price
the other reason is this : IMO from 15th AUGUST last year- ignore that Ghana is now divested thank goodness!
The self-coined “longest established start-up junior”, Azonto Petroleum’s (LON:AZO) aim is to start producing gas from its Gazelle project offshore Cote D'Ivoire by 2016.
Azonto is emerging from a difficult 12-18 months in which it has renegotiated its agreement with the Cote D'Ivoire government, extracted itself from an extraneous rig contract, and taken on a new joint venture partner in Vitol. Cote D’Ivoire’s GDP is growing by 10% annually and it is increasingly looking for domestic energy supplies, so demand seemingly won’t be a problem.
February 25th 2015
Two hundred and fifteen is a key year for Azonto Petroleum, with the FID on its Gazelle project in Cote d’Ivoire looming mid-year. The company, which is dual listed on AIM and the ASX, is hunkering down until then, shedding new business initiatives, cutting head count and reducing G&A in order to minimise cash burn until a decision is made on whether to move into full development.
This has been a painful process, admits new boss Grégory Stoupnitzky, with the company headcount shrinking from 19 to 13 and managing director Rob Shepherd and finance director Andrew Rose, who together had done so much to clean-up the troubled company, resigning in January.
“We all had ambitions a year ago that are no longer realisable in the current environment and so we had to refocus virtually all of our efforts to crystallise value from our primary asset in Cote d’Ivoire, and a five man executive team was not necessary for this really concentrated effort,” says former business development director Stoupnitzky, who will now run the company with technical director Jay Smulders, who has an impressive track record of maturing and delivering gas projects for Shell International and Tullow Oil, and general counsel Jeff Durkin.
Stoupnitzky, a former investment banker with 25 years of experience with stints at Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley and Renaissance Capital, stressed that Shepherd, familiar to many oilbarrel.com regulars for his straight-talking and entertaining presentations at past conferences, and Rose were still shareholders in the group and were working out their notices. “It was very amicable,” he tells oilbarrel.com. “It’s been painful but it p