The Winners

Aran Energy's 17,000 shareholders were the main beneficiaries of the takeover battle between Atlantic Richfield (Arco) and Norway's Statoil for control of the Irish exploration company in 1995.

In the end Statoil triumphed, securing Aran's coveted stake in the Schiehallion oilfield west of the Shetland Islands with its £198 million bid, worth 76p per share compared with a pre-bid price of 43p.

However, many small shareholders were critical of Aran's directors for approving an offer which was well below the 104p a share valuation put on the company by independent consultants.

Tullow Oil's share price has risen strongly in recent years, leaving investors who bought into the company in the early days sitting on a tidy profit. The recent news that the company has been invited by the government of Bangladesh to finalise a production-sharing agreement for two key exploration areas onshore Bangladesh gave a further fillip to the share price which recouped most of this year's earlier losses.

Tullow expects cash flow from its Pakistan operations this year and cash flow from the Ivory Coast will begin in 1999.

Arcon, in which Dr Tony O'Reilly has a 44 per cent stake and which is run by Dr O'Reilly's son, Tony jnr, said in May that it had processed more than 400,000 tonnes of ore at its lead-zinc mine in Galmoy since it began production there in March 1997.

The company also hived off its oil and gas interests into a separate company last year to allow it to focus exclusively on its mineral interests.

Arcon now plans to list its shares on New York's Nasdaq and has said it should be in a position to declare a dividend within two years.

The Losers

Shareholders have been the big losers in the long-running Bula Resources saga which has seen the company's share price mired at its current level just above 1p. Bula entered into an agreement with Mir Oil Development in August 1995, transferring 101 million shares to the Virgin Island registered company in return for a share of its involvement in the Salymskoye oil field in Siberia.

In October 1996, Bula announced successful results for a test well but corrected this statement the following May when it said the well results were disappointing. The High Court froze almost 74 million of the shares transferred to Mir in September 1997, pending clarification of who owned them. The other 27 million shares had already been sold.

The report by the Government-appointed inspector Mr Lyndon McCann, released last week, concluded that former chairman and managing director Mr Jim Stanley is the beneficial owner of Mir.

Atlantic Resources was founded by Dr Tony O'Reilly in the hope that it would become a major Irish oil and gas exploration company. It made its market debut in April 1981 and investors quickly scrambled to jump aboard what they were sure was a gravy train.

By November 1983, Atlantic had become the fourth largest company on the Irish Stock Exchange with a market valuation of £142 million, larger than CRH and five times larger than Independent Newspapers.

But its much-hyped oil find in the Celtic Sea which fuelled the share rise was ultimately deemed uncommercial and the price collapsed from an effective peak of 164.5p to a mere 2.25p. Atlantic was eventually taken over by Conroy Petroleum which valued the shares at 2.69p each.