UK 15:34 Friday, 23 October 2026
Breaking news and expert analysis on fast-moving AIM and LSE listed shares
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. 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.
MX Oil (MXO) appears to have sold its Nigerian assets for a good price today. The devil is in the detail and having chatted to CEO Stefan Oliver I shall be looking at the detail very shortly. But before we go any further I applaud Mr Oliver for doing what the fuckwit regulators fail to do, that is to say tackling market abuse.
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Comments
Duck and Dive
I fear your new chum will be wasting his time and money unless Panda1 turns out to be a known suit. Otherwise the defence is too easy. Slap-happy, cheap-chatty, cheeky-chappy brokers don’t exactly help this problem: on several occasions I have been told about a placing before being taken inside. The telephone conversation goes like this:
SH-CC-CC: Hello again, DD. Remember me? We got you in on that XXX placing a few months ago.
DD: Yes.
SH-CC-CC: Well I’ve got a belter for you now – MXO at 1.5p. If you want £50k I’ll have to take you inside of course.
DD: No thanks.
SH-CC-CC: OK old bean, good to talk to you. Catch you next time.
bwakem
The deal is not a very good one. They get advanced a chunk of money which they must spend making the well productive and then the purchaser can choose to buy it or not – and if not MXO must give the money it spent back to the proposed purchaser. I smell a rat!
Gary Newman
Bwakem,
What it does mean though is that MXO will actually secure ownership of the asset, which they wouldn’t have done had they been unable to make the payments due and would have been in danger of relinquishing it.
I won’t hold my breath as to the FCA actually taking any action – I’m certain that if they investigated all of the trades and those behind them, leading up to the original leak, then they’d definitely find market abuse (front-running and possibly shorts that weren’t declared).
To be fair to SO I think things now look an awful lot more positive than they did a week or so back, and also take my hat off to him for at least trying to fight back against those attempting to damage his company just so they can make a few quid themselves!
J P Spaghetti
“but if Panda1 had a position then making a statement as a fact when he had no evidence of that is market abuse”
Would it not still be market abuse even if he (or she) didn’t have a position – presenting a statement as fact without corroborating evidence?
panda1
Just to put the record straight. I had no insider knowledge that a placing was being arranged by MXO, nor was I tipped off about it by anyone. I didn’t have a position in MXO, either long or short. Furthermore, I haven’t participated in placings before and don’t have an account with a broker that allows access to placings.
My comment about a potential placing wasn’t presented as a statement of fact, what I wrote was: “Now that the share price has recovered, I think MXO may opt to complete a placing at say 1.5p so that it can hang onto the AJE asset.”
The comment was based on information in the public domain. From a recent RNS we know that the company had attempted a placing “at a targeted price range of between 0.5p and 1.0p” and that even after it received an offer for Aje it stated it “intends to continue to explore a potential placing”. I therefore reasoned that if the company was recently prepared to do a placing at between 0.5 and 1.0p then it would be very likely to take full advantage of a recovery in the share price to around 1.7p. A placing at 1.5p seemed the most likely scenario. I think anyone that had researched MXO, like GaryN, would have thought that a placing was likely.
I fully support the fact that Stefan wants to take a stand against market abuse and has reported suspicious price movements in MXO to the FCA. I have also complained about the same to the FCA on several stocks where I believed a placing had been front run by insiders.
wildrides
Your task for today students is to compare and contrast the two statements below :-
1) “As long as journalists do not have undisclosed positions in the shares (which I don’t) and are not made an insider or told by their source that the source is an insider ( so again Im in the clear) we are just doing our job”.
2) “Others are, however, breaking the law and Oliver has pledged to take action”.
Well how convenient for journalists that is readers . Anyone passing on information they know, or reasonably should know, has come from the inside ( and has not yet been announced formally to the market ) is clearly abusing the market in reality.