It’s been a quiet few months for San Leon Energy, the formerly listed exploration company run by Irish businessman Oisín Fanning, which is no longer listed in the London stock exchange’s junior AIM market, and so no longer required to give any public updates on its activities.
That will be frustrating to some of its investors, who have been awaiting news of a big fundraising for more than a year now.
By way of background, the company has been promising since the end of 2023 that it was close to a big funding deal that would help it to acquire a stake in an entity called Energy Link Infrastructure (Malta), which is building a pipeline to an oil exploration prospect in Nigeria called OML 18, in which San Leon also has an indirect stake.
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In October 2023, the company announced that it had struck a $187 million (€169 million) financing arrangement with a New York investment firm called Tri Ri Asset Management [Tram], and the following month it told the mark that Tram had confirmed that “funds were in the process of being transferred”.
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However by January 2024, it told the markets, “no funds have been received by the company”, so it went off to fund a new backer.
In March, it said that it had “received acceptable commercial terms from two prospective funders”, one of which was in “the final stages of negotiation”. The money, the company said, would be received by the end of the month.
That seemed to hit some delays, because in June the company said it had been “made a beneficiary of a €500 million German government bond”, which could be used as “security to obtain finance from a third party”. The identity of the donor was not disclosed.
By July, having had its shares suspended for its failure to file its 2022 annual report and subsequent interim reports, it announced it was delisting from the AIM market altogether.
It sounded yet another hopeful note, though, telling investors that its funding negotiations had “advanced considerably”, and that it believed that “funding will be received this month”.
It is now early September and a spokesperson told Cantillon that San Leon was “not in a position to comment at the moment”. The wait continues.
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