Hi Ele
I'm speculating, same as everyone here, but I'm reassured by Cath sleeping at night ... or sleeping until awakened by a 24/7 FAR fan emailing her at 2.00am!
To my mind, these tactics point to the size of the prize. Whether employed to weaken FAR for takeover, to weaken FAR to grab its assets cheaper, or weaken FAR to drive panicked shareholders into the shorters' arms is a moot point: The salient outtake is that FAR has something others want and we should all be joyous about that.
Thankfully FAR is not run by short-term nervous nellies who inhabit this and like forums. Were it so, we would be gone by now as there would have been 'no dilution' and hence no capital buffer thoughtfully put in place by our Board in April. I believe that cash - to paraphrase Cath - will prove to be the best $80m we've ever spent because it's brought us breathing space to grow the asset and to pour boiling oil over the barbarians trying to scale our ramparts.
DJ is a sideshow, and I think FAR is happy for Trace to frantically wave its CAP in a fruitless effort to distract it from the main game ... or should I say games? Those are:
> PE, which in the eyes of one interested observer is 'the only thing that matters - the rest is just noise'; and
> Cairn's intentions.
I say the second for two reasons. Firstly, I'm convinced Cairn is setting up SNE for sale; why else drill Sirius now? (Okay, unless it is as an infill before they return to Fan, but from intercepted chatter I'm not sure that will be worthwhile at this stage.) Secondly, as discussed here, FAR has Cairn snookered on the Operator issue and also has pre-emptive rights over its share of the oilfield. Cairn's next move is crucial, especially as we now have CNOOC's 'financial firepower' with its guns trained on Senegal.
What will Cairn do? I don't have a clue, but I certainly don't trust it and I'm sure FAR will have run a whole raft of scenarios to try to avoid being blindsided twice.
We all have our 'druthers' as to how this might unfold. I'd love us to win PE, as I like the thought of buying perhaps 300m barrels for $430m plus costs. Less that two bucks a barrel for oil that can be onsold for $4-8? I'll take that any day. This is one instance, though, where failure is actually an option, since we should wind up with our 'own' 130-150m barrels for sale. Sell it, pay a special divvie and then stick a hole in A2 - there you go, strategy on a stick.
Production? I guess there is a pathway paved with CNOOC's gold, but do we really want to take it? It's not our go, is it? We find stuff.
OOO
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