It is abundantly clear the previous reserves evaluator did not adhere to the guidelines as he claimed - if you believe that you have little knowledge of the oil and gas industry. Neither should MAD suggest this is due to some new regulations - if that were the case there would be similar revisions in various companies, which is plainly not the case.
ASIC should be asking if disclosures were appropriate. Given a previous executive director of the company had an SEC fine for overstating reserves should he have been allowed to be a director of an oil and gas company here? As a minimum an explicit disclosure should have been made about his previous fine. You have to question if the reason they were raising money over here was that with his name the US markets were closed to him.....as I suspect the Australian market is now.
People relying on an acquisition to rebuild the company will need to be very patient. The US has a highly competitive oil and gas asset market, to get order of magnitude returns in recent years has meant buying land prospective for shale before many results are available which means an exploration like risk profile, i.e. you run a risk that the land is worth not very much (hence Shell's recent write-offs). The opportunities to buy a property at a low price with lots of short term low risk development potential are very limited if not non-existent.
FDM Price at posting:
18.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held