Barryroe Offshore Energy’s (BOE) biggest shareholder, Larry Goodman, filed a petition on Friday with the High Court to have an examiner appointed to the oil explorer, making his move only days before shareholders were due to gather to vote on putting the company into liquidation.
The petition by Mr Goodman’s Vevan Unlimited vehicle, which owns almost 20 per cent of BOE, will be heard by Mr Justice Michael Quinn on July 31st. Kieran Wallace, managing director at Interpath Advisory in Ireland, is being proposed as the examiner.
The development is expected to lead to a postponement of a Barryroe extraordinary general meeting (egm) that was due to take place on Monday and was aimed at appointing David Swinburne, a chartered accountant and partner with Cork-based law firm FitzGerald Legal and Advisory, as liquidator of the company.
BOE, which is running out of cash, had been seeking to secure fresh funds from big shareholders to keep the company running in order to pursue legal action against Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan after he decided in May not to grant a permit for further work on the company’s key Barryroe oil and gas prospect off the Cork coast.
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However, The Irish Times reported earlier on Friday that there were no co-ordinated discussions going on between top shareholders to provide fresh funds, with only days to go before the egm.
It is speculated that Vevan will seek to provide funding as part of an examinership process that would allow BOE to effectively be run as a litigation vehicle to pursue a judicial review of the Minister’s decision.
A spokesman for Mr Goodman declined to comment on the petition.
BOE has burned through more than €270 million of cash raised from share placings over the past 12 years. Barryroe was the last remaining exploration hope. The prospect, 50km off the Cork coast, was found more than a decade ago to have more than 300 million barrels of oil as well as gas resources. BOE saw three development partnership deals fall through over the period.
Mr Goodman’s Vevan vehicle moved last November to provide a €40 million funding backstop for the Barryroe project, after Mr Ryan’s department expressed concerns about BOE’s ability to fund the next stage of work on the field while officials considered an application for a crucial permit, known as lease undertaking.
Vevan subsequently allowed other big BOE shareholders, including businessman Nick Furlong’s Pageant Holdings and UK hedge fund Kite Lake, to participate in the funding line.
The Minister, however, relied on a criterion in non-mandatory guidelines issued by his department in 2019 – that licence applicants should have net tangible assets of 3½ times the cost of planned works – to refuse the permit.
Meanwhile, Lansdowne Oil & Gas, which has a 20 per cent stake in the Barryroe oil project, said on Friday it had conditionally raised €200,000 through a share sale to fund initial work pursuing an international legal case against the Republic after Mr Ryan’s decision.
UK-based Lansdowne, as a foreign-owned company, can pursue international arbitration under an energy charter treaty to which the UK and Ireland are signatories. Its legal advisers, Ashurst, submitted a letter to the Irish State on June 19th requiring that it take part in discussions with a view to settling the dispute within three months of the notice.
“The placing funds are expected to provide working capital beyond this three-month period and, during this time, Lansdowne will advance discussions with external litigation funders, many of whom have already approached the company,” it said on Friday.
