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I think it’s time to stop following this. Hands up the shareholders who don’t feel they’ve been royally legged over.

“The Company has now to execute the final documentation after which it will proceed to completion and drawdown.”. This is from the 14July RNS. So the ball is in Angus’s court.. The £3.5mm payment to Mercuria for the missed hedge payments is due by today. Aleph are providing the bridging loan. I don't suppose Mercuria care very much how they get paid (subject to the covenants on the £12mm. loan) but I think it’s quite unlikely that they won’t want some additional sweetener for agreeing to yet another extension. It’s hard see why Angus won’t meet the payment today, they only had to finalise the documentation. So there’s should be an RNS saying it’s been paid by 6pm. Why they’d leave it to the last moment is a mystery to me.

Balancedviewer: I don’t expect Mercuria to pull the plug on Angus today, whether Angus meets the payment when it’s due or not. But if the payment is missed again, there will b a price to pay for their continued support and the only other recourse Angus has is a further big share placing. So some arrangement fee may be negotiated for Mercuria’s benefit while a share issue of some kind is put together. If Angus have got the money from the bridging loan, no problem, other than meeting its terms in due course. Either way, there should be an RNS today.

TerryMC1: it’s true that Vast is in a difficult position with regard to the large overdue loan repayment to Mercuria. But as I said yesterday, Mercuria doesn’t appear to want to own mines etc., it wants to make large profits on very expensive loan terms to companies who do. Look at Angus Energy. As long as Vast’s shareholders are prepared to put up more cash through share placings, I think it’s unlikely that Mercuria will pull the plug. The downside is that they’re not a charity and there’s always a quid pro quo. Capstone know more than anyone on these chat boards, though.

Bubblepoint: WG818 is quite correct that a payment of £3.5mm, financed by the prospective £6mm.bridging facility (which itself is awaiting only Angus’s signature) is due to be.paid to Mercuria today, If the news of this timetable merited an earlier RNS, surely the actual payment does too?

360phil: he’s an accountant, he’s an insider and he’s selling. It may just be that he’s not being exposed all day long to bullish posts written by people who’ve done no research and haven’t a clue about the financial situation. Or he may merely want the sales proceeds for another project.

HITS: he got a very sweet deal, didn't he?

Re solvency, if a company has debts which it can’t meet, and particularly if those debts bear demanding covenants, as Vast’s do, then on the date when payment is due the lender may be able to seize its assets and sell them for whatever he can get for them to get his money back. Or keep the assets.

Vast has missed the repayment date twice on its loan. The only way it will be able to repay the debt in the near term is through finding and selling its diamonds - the chance of which appears to me to be negligible.

However, Mercuria doesn’t seem to want to run mines and has given them more rope twice and it does appear that Capstone has increased its shareholding. On balance, I’d be surprised if Vast are taken over/asset stripped. More likely is a more onerous, longer-term loan proposition, possibly with royalties and a generous grant of equity/warrants. This would relieve the pressure on the share price of fears of imminent bankruptcy, at the price of a much larger proportion of future cash flows going to the lenders. Investors will have to work out for themselves whether this will be good or bad for the share price. I should expect a relief rally, before the terms sink in. Capstone are smarter than I am, however, and a holding of their size will take a while to sell. If they’re in it for the medium or long term, it may be that Vast is a better investment than it looks at the moment.

Fat finger: ... or he thinks a price below 1p is still a good price at which to sell.

Yes, HITS, but surely the important point about Mr. Forrest’s sales is that the original acquisition price of his shares isn’t relevant. What’s relevant are his view of their current value, and as an insider he should be well informed on that, and his own financial needs. He’s either got something better to invest in or he thinks a price below 1

Asimpleinvestor: I think investors are concerned about Vasts’s ability to meet their debt repayment schedule in the absence of the diamonds. But if Capstone is prepared to buy 8% of the company at this point, I should think it’s unlikely that the lenders are about to pull the plug. If this is correct, there should be substantial upside in the share price from current levels.

Asimpleinvestor: thanks again. It’s much clearer on the site you’ve attached than in the company RNS, with my mini iPad. I wonder what the initial swap contract was all about and who was on the other side of it. In any case, it’s history now, Capstone appears to own outright more than 8%. They must be pretty sure that Vast’s lenders won’t pull the plug, diamonds or no diamonds.

Asimpleinvestor: thanks for this. Have I missed an announcement about it?

Isn’t Capstone’s investment in Vast a swap contract, not a shareholding? They have the voting rights over their investment but own no shares, if I’m reading the April RNS right. I don’t know what the implications of this are for the share price. If anyone does, I’d be interested to see it.

Do you really believe that Zimbabwean voters could give two hoots about a British mining company taking possession of Zimbabwe diamonds that were put in the Reserve Bank vaults fifteen years ago? They’d be more surprised than I would be to find that the diamonds are still there. If they are, I dare say they’d vote to keep them if they could. Rule of law? Zimbabwe? That’s a good one.

Asimpleinvestor: of course the present government of Zimbabwe knows where the diamonds are, or where they have gone. Secondly, Vast‘s entitlement to them will not be In the top one million factors in deciding the Zimbabwe electorate’s choice of a new government.

The diamonds were deposited there a long time before 2019.

If Mr. Mugabe sent a couple of his fellow freedom fighters down to the Reserve Bank and made the Governor an offer he couldn’t refuse, I don’t suppose that a period of six months would have ensued before the diamonds were delivered into their custody, while they discussed the appropriate protocols for giving a customer back his property, which had been placed in the Bank’s safekeeping.

I can think of only one reason why the Bank is putting all these obstacles in the way of giving back Vast’s diamonds. It seems to me that investing in a company in the hope that its finances will be rescued by the prompt delivery of its valuable but probably absent property, when the alternative could well be bankruptcy, is sticking your neck out a long way.

Bubblepoint: the poet Kipling put it best in his poem “if”, which ends with the words

“Yours is the Earth and all that’s in it

And, which is more, you’ll be a man, my son.”

In the middle of the poem he says this, as a condition of becoming a man:

“If you can bear to hear the words you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to set a trap for fools...”

There's nothing new in the world, it was always thus. You just have to put up with these people and what they’re saying about you. Rise above it and don’t let it get to you, just don’t engage with them.

Robday: re the prospective flow rate reduction, it’s there in the CPR. I’m not making it up. The build up in pressure in an existing well after a period of being shut in for a period of years virtually always results in a temporary higher flow, which is what is happening currently. In fact, in an answer to one Investor Question, if I remember right, Angus stated that the temporary increase was expected to end after 6 months. I agree that it seems not to have happened yet but the fact that it hasn’t begun to fall after 10 months hardly invalidates the opinion of the Competent Person that the decline in the flow rate might be expected to start after 12 months, does it?

In my view, all the proposed new loan does is give Angus about £3mm more, net, in borrowings, at a lower but still extremely high interest rate. And at the cost of accelerating the application of the 8% royalty in Mercuria’s favour. And the add-on costs in favour of Aleph and its investors in terms of arrangement etc. fees will more than outweigh the lower interest rate, at least for the first year. There will be further costs to roll it over after 18 months.

I agree with part of what bubblepoint wrote in his recent post. With their cash flows from gas and condensate sales, why do they need extra financing? I can only conclude that they haven’t been open with investors as to the full cost of that sidetrack.

A presumed asset value of £300mm. misses the point. It’s a stand-alone field, the flow rate declining at 10% p.a. and its returns to its owners circumscribed by big debts at penal interest rates, an 8% royalty and by hedges, the full terms of which are still being disguised, for some reason. If it costs you almost the same per annum to get the gas out of the ground, treated and piped to the customer ((Shell, in this case) as it returns you in revenue, it’s not worth £300mm. to a buyer - or anything remotely like it. There is clearly some interest in the field for storage purposes, but that won’t be economic until most of the remaining gas has been extracted from the Westphalian layer. And the cost of preparing the field for storage was put at £200-225mm 13 years ago.

Re Brockham and the other oil assets, hasn’t the Board recently referred to Angus as a single-asset company?

This isn’t negative reporting, it’s the way things are. You can argue with it but these are the fundamentals here. Anything can happen on AIM, maybe an offer will be made for Angus, who knows? The share price may well be bid much higher in the short term, as small investors buy on a misunderstanding of the implications of Friday’s RNS. But the fundamentals don’t seem to me to support a sustained big rise in the share price and I think their being spelt out on these chat boards is only in small investors’ interests.

Of course, for investors looking for something geared to a big, sustained rise in UK gas prices, they could hardly do better.