what's going on?, page-8

Bought in y'day as it looks to me from the sell depth that this is being weighed down and that usually imlplies one of two things- ie, someone wants the company or someone wants more shares. I figured when that stops it will go back to 15c or so.

After reading the recent posts I had a look at the contention that the board has its head in the trough and that salaries and bonuses are out of hand for senior execs.

I could be wrong, but looking at the latest annual report I don't think that call is right.

The payments to the outgoing ceo were absurd..clearly he wrote his own ticket somehow, but other than that where are these options which they are supposedly giving themselves? No options were issued to top execs as far as I can see in FY09. If I have missed that somewhere in the report my apologies in advance. A total of 1,457,818 options were given to employees of the Company, so all told that is 140k in options issued and they look like they went to the right people- ie the guys in the field.

The top three execs under the CEO do get well rewarded, but at 330k, 322k and 218k for the production manager, exploration manager, and CFO - I don't think that is out of hand. Cash bonuses were modest last year at 20k for these 3 (I know we could argue why get any but I would imagine that came from increasing the 2p reserves.) Again Nguyen walked out with a bonus he probably didn't deserve of 70 k on top of his hefty salary of 456k.

While that size of the ceo's salary is a bit of a worry for a small co. its not unheard of at all and the compensating factor here is the board appears to get poorly rewarded ( all they deserve ?). They each got 44k and 77k for the chairman. That is low by asx standards and more than covers the extra 100k we might otherwise hope to save on a lower paid ceo.

Given the success the new CEO had at Otto I don't see how
you would attract someone with his background without a 400k plus salary..jmho.

Time will tell is he has the ability to deserve 8k a week!
Would have like to see them get moving with this fraccing project asap rather than stall on it..

Any projections on the Dec qtr results? I'm hoping they can reduce their production and admin costs a bit and deliver a much improved cash flow scenario and without the drilling costs that might come through as an operating profit..