UK 07:16 Wednesday, 23 September 2026
Breaking news and expert analysis on fast-moving AIM and LSE listed shares
Disclosure: The author has a short position in one or more of the shares mentioned. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from ShareProphets). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
I wrote yesterday that I doubted that Seplat would offer a deal that would prove acceptable to Afren's board and so it has proven. They have been told to sling their hook and off they go, having proved themselves to be time wasters.
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Comments
Mark
Was this written on your own or did you have to wait for Uncle Lucien after you finished school?
That the SP rebounded significantly after the RNS hit was a good thing. The SEP deal was bad for all.
Now if this was looking bad from here, the SP would have tanked already.
Oops!
I smell burning….
KANGAROO
Thanks for your clear explanations Waseem.
john g
Today’s Sunday Times :
Lenders poised to seize reins at Afren
Investors in scandal-hit oil producer face wipe-out in bondholder plan
Danny Fortson Published: 15 February 2015
INVESTORS in Afren face being wiped out under a rescue deal being finalised by the company’s lenders.
The beleaguered London-listed oil producer announced on Friday that it had ended rescue takeover talks with rival Seplat.
Afren, once a stock market darling, was worth £1.4bn last summer before the oil price fall and a pay scandal led to a share price collapse. On Friday its stock closed at 8p, valuing it at just £79m. Afren said last month that it needed to raise more than £200m to stay afloat.
With the Seplat rescue dead, bondholders are hammering out a recapitalisation plan that would allow Afren to survive, but in effect give them control.
An ad-hoc committee representing 40% of Afren’s $860m in bonds last week became “restricted”, meaning they have been handed the non-public financial information they need to engineer the financing.
Details are still being hammered out, but the bailout is likely to have several elements, including new loans and a debt for equity swap. The bondholders are being advised by restructuring specialists at Blackstone.
Sources close to the situation said there is an outside chance that Bert Cooper, an Afren co-founder who left the company several years ago, could table a rival plan backed by a handful of big Chinese investors.
Afren has little time. It faces a $50m (£32m) loan repayment in a fortnight. The scuffle for control marks the latest in an extraordinary string of events that turned one of the great London market success stories into a scandal-ridden disaster.
Afren shocked shareholders last summer when it suspended chief executive Osman Shahenshah, the operations head Shahid Ullah, and two other executives over allegations that they had received “unauthorised payments”. The executives were fired three months later. Shahenshah and Ullah have since given back $20m to Afren, but have denied wrongdoing.
The 50% oil price drop has created an acute cash crunch. Afren’s predicament was worsened when its interim management wrote off assets in Kurdistan, for which it paid $588m four years ago.