Cantillon: US Oil & Gas suffers Danish regulatory issues

Regular readers may recall that last year these pages featured a report on US Oil & Gas plc, a Dublin-based company with an interest in oil exploration in Hot Creek Valley, Nevada. In the 2009 to 2011 period, the company’s shares traded on the London Plus market, going as low as 7p each and as high as 97p, before trading was suspended.

The shares were delisted in April 2012, and immediately listed on the Danish-regulated GXG, a tertiary market considered to be less regulated than Plus. They rose in value to almost £7 in 2012, during which year the media reported that the well in Nevada had produced evidence of oil potentially worth hundreds of millions of euro.

In November that year, the company secured a High Court order aimed at identifying who had posted allegedly defamatory remarks about it on internet message boards. The company lost €132 million in value after “totally untrue” postings said its Nevada drilling project was a “scam” by “liars”, the court heard.

The company has now filed its audited accounts for the year to the end of September 2014, and they show a loss for the year of $491,591. Administrative expenses were $492,025. They included remuneration and emoluments for chairman and chief executive Brian McDonnell of $123,848, and $76,000 between the company’s three non-executive directors.

In his statement accompanying the accounts, Mr McDonnell said the drop in administrative expenditure, from $1.6 million the previous year, was due to reduced exploration activity and reduced legal and professional fees. Cash and cash-equivalents at year’s end were $358,000.

In December last year, trading in the company’s shares was suspended on the GXG market. The accounts note: “The basis for the suspension, as communicated to the company by GXG Markets, was a ‘disorderly market’ seemingly connected to letters of complaint, including anonymous letters, internet comment, and the breaking of unspecified market rules.”

In February, again according to the accounts, GXG announced that a due diligence report on US Oil & Gas would be requested.

“The board expects that the due diligence report will effectively and finally put an end to a sustained campaign of vilification and defamation directed against the company,” Mr McDonnell said in his report.

The company’s overriding objective, he said, remains to drill further wells in Hot Creek Valley, as well as other associated moves.