In general I'd agree with wanting to see the plan for moving...

In general I'd agree with wanting to see the plan for moving ahead, but I'd also like to see what financial liabilities are also lying in wait. Discovering financial hand grenades hidden in plain sight in the depths of a prospectus can hardly be considered as clear and open disclosure and I hope those days are now behind us.

In regard to Alexis's departure, I think he deserves that we cut him a little bit of slack. He appears to me to have been running this pretty much single-handedly. I believe that he is technically very competent and we have benefited from this. Less than a year ago we were a 30 boepd producer, today we're at 10 times that level and I think he deserves the credit for this.

Yes, Foothills would have been really nice and this is where being an oil/gas guru unfortunately didn't make him the ideal CEO. I've seen this happen time and time again, at all levels. How many small businesses fail because a technically brilliant butcher / hairdresser / electrician / graphic artist / florist was insufficiently skilled at financial planning and management? Personal financial failure is bad enough; it's an order of magnitude worse when you're running a public company and you're managing share-holders' money.

The criticism of the financial management of AOW is justified and I've previously been critical, but I think the finger-pointing and name-calling needs to swing around to those who were expected to have expertise in this area, viz. the former CFO and the Board. Did the CFO provide proper advice to Alexis? Where was the oversight from the Board? I think the fact that the initial changes instigated by Defender/Vertua were pretty telling - the immediate departure of the CFO and the changes to the Board - yet these passed with next to no comment or discussion here. Likewise the inordinate amount of time that it's taking to resolve the accounts - what sort of chaos did the ex-CFO leave us with, and where was the oversight from the Board.

The announcement makes it clear that there is now far greater financial control over the company and I for one look forward to effective "continuity of management of AOW assets" and, when appropriate, to the expansion of operations as was previously envisaged. I just hope that Alexis's surname with two different spellings within 4 lines of the announcement isn't an indication of ongoing confusion and carelessness.