Member Info for OofyProsser

Someone must have paid the rig owner to move it to the site. Aladdin won’t have paid if they didn’t get the money in advance from UKOG. UKOG may have been able to pay for this but there will be payments for drilling too, won’t there? They’ll need more money before they can finance it. So either the drill will be very slow or UKOG will be raising funds shortly. It’s perfectly clear, isn’t it?

Mirasol: the rig they’re using is not one of AME’s, is it?

Ian12: this is not one of AME’s rigs, is it?

ian12: I take your point but he’s saying they need to drill more wells before they “fully understand how things fit together”. Doubtless a gusher at any point will be exploitable as a producing well but it reads to me as if he’s softening up the market for a long programme of expenditure, not a decent early oil find.

Ocelot: I must be missing something. It doesn’t sound as if Mr. Sanderson is expecting a gusher, does it? He’s saying they’ll need to drill more wells before they understand how things fit together. This well isn’t going to produce oil or revenue. They had just £1.9mm. left at end-March. How are they going to pay for a programme of exploration/appraisal wells? They had borrowings of £3mm. at end-March.

Ocelot: from my reading of them, none of the charts, from one year to five year, looks any good at all.

Re the accounts, they had £1.9mm. at end-March in cash and borrowings of over £3mm. Creditors are a fair bit higher too.

Re Turkey, is this all the current well is for:

“Given the complex nature of the subsurface there are, of course, no absolute guarantees of success, but we remain confident that Basur-3 will move our understanding of the accumulation in the right direction. Due to the size of the geological structure, follow up wells will undoubtedly be required, notably in the southeastern culmination at the Resan end, before we fully understand how things fit together.”?

So no oil, just an exploration well to be followed by a series of other exploration/appraisal wells, before they “understand how things fit together”? I realise that oil exploration is a time consuming and money consuming business but UKOG doesn't appear to have enough of either to complete this evaluation programme. Lots more placings ahead, or will shareholders decide enough is enough?

If I were the fashion icon who runs this, I’d wait until next month. You don’t want to be hasty - not when there’s an exploration well being drilled in Turkey. There’s real money at stake here.

TheReverand: I’m not sure that Aladdin's principals will be too interested in that. Placings and Riverfort loans don’t hold all that much appeal to discerning investors and the Aladdin people will be more interested in capital appreciation from their investments than in their excessive monthly salary payments.

Exploration: in Angus Energy’s case, their balance sheet has contained a number of debtors, being sums owing by junior partners in wells of which Angus is the operator, and Angus doesn’t seem to have found a formula whereby they can make them pay up. They’ve accepted compromise payments which appear to imply that the debts were in effect unenforceable.

Sageman: I’d say the Earl of Lucan is coming up fast on the rails..

Incidentally, the 2020 annual accounts were published in April but are not on the Companies House site. Have they forgotten to file them?

Cynderlsd: they certainly do need a Chairman who understands that the Weald includes some of the most beautiful landscapes/living environments in the world and that it’s not a dust bowl with tumbleweed blowing about, where complaints about oil drilling will come only from the non-Board rattlesnakes who inhabit it, poor things.

The poor Directors here have yet another pressing issue to weigh in the balance now, with their share purchase scheme in place. Do they buy now, ahead of the pump, or do they expect a lower price after the dump? It’s a few weeks to the next bit of news, isn’t it? They need money soon, don’t they? If I were doing the drilling, I’d want full payment from UKOG before I got half way. It would be a bit silly to buy before the placing and the figures on Wednesday (if they are published then, as they were last year) are unlikely to justify a higher share price. Perhaps they’ll wait until the dump appears to have finished.

Spud today. Placing tomorrow? Half yearly figures on Wednesday?

Sir Winston Churchill’s aphorism that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” applies to company managements as much as it does to politics and governments. Surely it’s clear to everyone that Mr. Sanderson, lacking any better option, has shoved all of UKOG’s remaining resources - and some it hopes to raise in future placings - on 36? Investors are not even backing his rational judgment by buying/staying invested in this. They’re betting on his gamble. The gamble of a man whose motivation is not so much to find oil in Turkey as it is to maintain his comfortable salary package for another 18 months or so. History is not on UKOG’s side.

As for candidates to replace him, hiring The Earl of Lucan would be merely jumping out of the frying pan. Though of course his services might be acquired more cheaply. Mr. Sanderson, using a similar argument to Ocelot’s in respect of the Aladdin deal, would probably explain his own salary package with a reference to the old saw “if you pay peanuts, you get people with no oil or gas experience”.

....his excessive salary and emoluments, which is what these two companies are all about, what?

Lucan’s not a wheeler dealer, he’s a grasper at straws and the vendors of Poundland saw him coming from quite a distance. Still, in common with the CEO here, he’s managed to achieve some more months of hi

These few most recent posts demonstrate the inability of the shills on here to offer any rationale whatsoever for their ramping claims and their future price fantasies. It’s all drivel.

BadA: you’re not, if it’s not a big part of your overall investments. A bit of fun, I dare say and you never know. As long as you don’t hold out unreasonable expectations of a well that’s not likely to show commercial quantities of oil or get upset when the price falls below your entry price. . No, not rocket science. I’m not trying to stop people investing, just to understand the risks.

Ozzy: I think most of the naysayers are long term holders who are thoroughly disillusioned with, and justifiably sceptical of, the current management. I dare say some are venting, some warning potential new buyers of the big pitfalls in it. Many are doing both, I should think. There’s a tendency among private investors to be unwilling to take a big loss on their investments in very volatile shares and I dare say some invested many thousands of pounds in this and now have just a few hundred, or less. I think they’re fully entitled to express their honest opinions on it, based on their experience, don't you? Mug punters ignore such people’s warnings at their peril and it’s wrong to describe them as nimbies, trolls etc. Their voices are in any case mostly drowned out by people on the other side, some of whom appear to be company PR types desperate to get the price up. The quality of the investment research of the sceptics appears to me to be incomparably superior to that of the optimists, too.

DavidWK: if Turkey fails to gush, shareholders will be asked for lots more money to drill yet more Turkey wells - by which time any rally between spud and result will be unwound and the price will probably be a good deal lower than it is now. So what you're describing is a pump and dump. Buy it before drilling starts. Sell into any rally. People who are expressing sceptical opinions are not pump-and-dumpers. Otherwise they'd be doing what you’re doing. Where’s the point in trying to get the price down another 10% when a successful pump and dump will give them a multiple of this?

No, the naysayers believe what they’re saying. They think it’s extremely unlikely that the Turkey well will gush. It would be fairer to admit that this is the distinction between bulls and bears of UKOG. The bulls expect a successful well, in which case they’ll make a multiple of their recent purchase price. The bears accept this possibility but give it a very low probability. In which case the price will fall further as big placings are made and the placee shares find their way onto the market. The pump and dump brigade don’t care, they’re just looking for a nice profit as the mug punters whom they entice in drive their share price up. It’s not the naysayers who are doing this, is it?