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Makes sense that we are ignored by the market to a certain degree. Plenty of companies making strides out there and whom likewise see no uplift in the SP. Why should we be any different. I am confident that the points mentioned by Tom and other are evident for all to see. As Tom puts it, 'commercial flow rate & RFP award'. As the company puts it in today's interims:

'The near-term objectives, aimed at negating the currently perceived principal risks, are considered by the Company to be achieving an enhanced gas flow from the Lesedi development wells and obtaining a clear pathway to gas monetisation via a power purchase agreement or equivalent. The first half of 2019 should see significant advancements towards achieving one or both of these objectives.'

The greatest opportunity for value creation is obviously before news. Just remains to seen now whether investors are confident enough that we will get both.

Excellent progress all round. Near term catalyst with the result of the RFP to be announced.

Keep it going TLOU.

Precisely Wilson. It is clear that the price of oil has a significant bearing on our ability to secure service provision funding.

Not sure I can take that article seriously. You cannot ask for a more biased piece when it is written by one of the two main contenders against the other main contender. I haven't seen any independent source picking that story up and running with it. No doubt Buhari will come up with his own biased piece which again i won't take seriously unless independently corroborated.

Personally i would want Buhari to win if it means a quick release of approvals after the election. But then If Kola Karim has been extremely generous towards Atiku to the tune of $30m+ then he may be in love with Kola and his enterprises. Intrestingly that when that donation story went out I couldn't find that in any independent Nigerian press release either .

Can't argue with that Jiving, good post. Totally agree that costs around offices etc and Arthurs own renumeration could have been addressed while retaining the key technical staff. I also agree that Arthurs direct relationship with investors has been poor with it seems an almost contemptuous approach being adopted by him on occasions. He is not a man who try's too hard to please in the relationship department.

All that having been said, and said by many, I am firmly of the opinion that Nigeria and political shenanigans elsewhere surrounding the pricing of oil has stalled this project and our expected returns not Arthur. He could most certainly have made savings had he the will to do so but he could not have prevented the need to raise caused by Nigerian bureaucracy and indeed the wider issue of oil prices and the reasons for its volatility. Delays have caused disabling damage to us not Arthur. However it is right to question whether Arthur could and should have done more to mitigate, as much as possible, the effect of those delays on investors.

That now being out of the way, if I am right and we have broken the back of the bureaucracy and if Arthur is right and a floor is now in on the oil price then we are at a point where we can realistically look forward to confirmation of approvals and an SP agreement. We can then talk about some value being created. There's nothing that can be done about the spectre of the placing that runs alongside my positivity but at least, and to their credit, the placing has been fully signposted by the company for some time (was I just complaining about us not being informed by Arthur!).

The maintenance of a full team can be argued either way as can just about anything as far as the running of this company is concerned.

Some (including me) argue against securing another 'production opportunity' or Mozambique being furthered at this time. However the other way to look at it is that had Arthur had another well developed opportunity on the go at the time of the Liberia drill then he could have rocked straight onto it and we would have been unlikely to have seen the level of dilution we have now. Perhaps he doesn't want to be in the same position again if OPL doesn't offer up what is expected

Similarly some (not me) would argue that he should not have kept his full team on while we waited for OPL 226 to get approved and drilling. Firstly his team is COPL. Absolutely. Without them he has zero leverage to get involved in projects with the likes of Exxonmobil and Shorleine. These players want commitment. They don't give a fig about a joint venture companies investors (us) but they do want to see a committed team working with them not a half arsed company who have no continuity in technical staff because they keep getting laid off.

I have looked at other companies working to drill in Nigeria and the reality is no one could predict, including Arthur, when the government was/is going to authorise drilling. So at what point do you make a decision to lay off staff. This has taken far longer than expected but there really is a plus side in the longer run and that we have now got a vastly accelerated initial development lined up with NNPC encouragement. That has had to be worked through and a field development plan submitted by those same technicians people would have had laid off.

We have been well diluted, more is coming that's for sure. But no explorer survives without that cash revenue and here we are all paying the penalty of time taken to secure the right to hold the EEPL shares and the right to drill. You can see why Nigeria's economy, one that relies upon oil revenue, is dropping with the bureaucracy it has. The key is being able to work through that bureaucracy, many have failed. We though may well have just broken its back.

I am highly confident we have approval for the field development now let us get a service provider agreement in place and get that pipe down.

At least there is no political bias (corruption) in the multi-million/billion dollar Nigerian gas & oil approvals system ;-)

This may be a reason for the weeks delay;

'As Nigerians prepared to cast their votes, data analysts raised concerns about the number of new voters registered since January 2018, which they said increased by almost exactly the same percentage in each of the country’s states, and suggested that the results of Saturday’s presidential election could be open to mass rigging.

Plotted on a scatter line graph, there was a 0.99 correlation across all the states, without a single outlier. According to three separate data analysts, the parity cannot be a coincidence, and two of them called it a “statistical impossibility”. “Only God works that closely,” one said.'
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/15/revealed-nigerian-voter-data-is-statistically-impossible

Cheers for posting that Burton. And I'm sure that once the Bots Gov demonstrate their support for this little old international company with a positive on the RFP then other international companies will be sniffing to see whether they should get involved on this first mover enterprise.

I don't mind being one of the odd one's out here. I am pretty happy that since July 18 it is more likely than not that Arthur has been truthful with us. We can all shout about the SPA that was due in a month but that statement was hit after the event with Essar Mauritius escalating with a notice of default. Thereafter it became a commercial dispute. That also put the project back enough to align with the price of oil dropping significantly. Likely to impact on a service provider's view whether to invest at that time? I think so. The gulf between a CEO saying something is hopefully going to happen then it doesn't and saying something has happened when it hasn't is massive. The approvals are done, signed off by President Buhari as indeed he signed the PSC extension in October. '...there is a possibility that Arthur is now telling the truth but I think it would be foolish of us as investors to not look at his previous behaviour.' Yes indeed and that includes all his behaviour not just the negative. I am on record as saying that I do believe Arthur, not out of naivety, but based upon progress that prior to July 18 I thought was not at all certain.I believe we have three service providers offering services provided our terms and theirs are right. Will we get finance?Probably is my view. What i do want to see is that it is not just approval for the field development that has been given but also approval for Shoreline's acquisition of EEPL's shares. That is a biggie for me.

'......and may go a little way to getting rid of the constant negativity and scepticism surrounding this project at the moment'.

There will be many who think otherwise. A clear headed look at the project tells you the negativity and scepticism doesn't lie with it but with this board.

Every chance of the approvals hitting before the raise with the SPA coming a distant third for me Bob.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/11/nigeria-election-mr-honesty-muhammadu-buhari-tainted-by-failure-to-tackle-corruption

There's an irony in labelling someone's positivity as 'spin' in a post that doesn't give that same label to the posters own negativity.

Why does positivity or negativity have to be 'spin' and not just an individuals appreciation of the present situation as they see it, in other words an opinion?

Jiving, We know he must release the significant news of approval(s) to the market once he has been authorised to do so by the government. But of course the grant of approvals is not political only it seems the release of the news that the grant of approvals has taken place is political. Go figure.

The pursuing of acquisitions or at least uttering that is what he is doing was a verbal misstep by Arthur. This is not the time for that talk. He introduced to the market further concerns on financing that may be totally unwarranted. We know his ambitions but we are still crawling as a company let alone walking and his dream of running is precisely that a dream until we get OPL 226 on the road.

But saying we are not in a financial position to fund acquisitions at this time is different from identifying and entering into early talks. The reality is that OPL 226 isn't occupying all his time at the moment it seems, maybe that's because the FDP is in, he's had years to do a considerable amount of the detail and now there is a bit of a hiatus for a COO until we can get the funding agreed. Given how long it takes to pick up the right opportunity (years each for OPl 226 and Mozambique) I suspect we won't see anything in this respect until after we become income generating.

Full credit, some battle your fighting here Dunc. Your stamina is outstanding.

The only thing on many minds is the not too distant dilution which has greatly undermined sentiment in relation to approvals. For me sentiment will change once any dilution is known and has been kicked over and as long as the price of a barrel has its floor at $60. When dilution hits it might not be pretty for a while but the underlying value of the asset as you rightly point out is significant. By my reckoning we are sitting on around $25m-$30m worth of 3D seismic in addition to the signature fee of $37m that Essar paid for OPL226 and that's without any money we have put into developing the field plan. So value is sat there particularly with the extended PSC.

We will get confirmation of field development approval and I hope approval for the acquisition of EEPL's shares then it's all on for the SPA. Given our asset our lights won't be going out, dimmed for a while yes I think that's almost certain. Look beyond that and there is every prospect from what we know that a raise will be surrounded, both before and after, by significant good news, news that we have all been waiting a long time to see.

As an aside 3D is what a lot of explorers are valued upon (we are both appraiser and explorer). Ours is excellent but clearly is not yet factored in, overlooked by the market and indeed us to a great extent no doubt because of concerns over the length of time this project has taken to get anywhere near ready for drilling. Get moving in the next 6 months or so and I expect those values to start to be drawn into the SP.

All for realistic views crizmo.

The reality is that every explorer is always running out of money. We are fortunate that we are funded well for our current drilling programme and that there is then a significant amount left after that campaign is finished.

If everyone took your view regarding finance for explorers and viewed this as a bad RNS then there would be no investors and no explorers. It's always a matter of time before the next raise unless you invest in a company that has positive cashflow. In the meantime we await significant news.

Yes thanks for that Agogna/Applamma. Be good if we had that more open system for having companies confirm their intentions/ability to stay solvent as a matter of routine oversight in our regulatory structure.

The company are spending money. Yep. And rightly so.

Warming the cockles of my heart.

Always been really good potential here with the resource and management combo plus the necessary support of the government and terrific demand for the gas. Looking forward to this year with TLOU it has to be said.

(Was hoping your drop would come true today BTS but it wasn't to be, more paid today than yesterday unfortunately. I will keep adding as I have been doing while we are down in the basement. Reality is that it is likely we will not be there for long).