Ann: West Erregulla Update, page-24

I am not interested in any takeover of STX at anything less than 20 times what we're at now. I was in WPL in the very early days soon after they discovered the NW Shelf and they were raising money hand over fist from shareholders and London bankers to build the facilities up there. I ended up selling out at around $3 to pay off a housing investment loan that was costing me 18% pa in interest during Keating's recession. I would have been in front had I held onto the shares and kept them until Shell offered $8/share in a takeover bid that was blocked by Costello on national interest grounds. Then they rose to over $38 in 2018. That kind of capital growth gain made the interest cost I was paying on the loan seem like pennies, and made Shell's bid look like theft. I see no reason why STX cannot grow to the size of WPL in the next 30 years - add in a lot more gas discoveries and downstream processing like urea and hydrogen, and then they start paying annual dividends which are 5 times higher than today's share price. I'm here for the long term, not just for a 30% gain in a few months time. Have a look at FMG's record since its inception, and the annual dividends it's paying now compared to its share price of 10 years ago.