I had a fairly sleepless night like a lot of others no doubt and also like others, I was staggered to receive the news that our Board had literally sold us out. My losses will be horrendous, in fact I had planned on living off the dividends in years to come. How naive of me. As mentioned before, I spoke face to face with Vesey after the AGM who assured us that all was under control and travelling reasonably well. We just need to add some more liquidity and Mike has a number of options that he was working on. He even mentioned that it may be possible to sell out 6Mtpa to Vietnam thus reaching FID this year. What a turnaround. If I had the slightest hint that this was our best option, I would have ran for the exit door. I don't know how Vietnam will feel about buying all their LNG from a Chinese company now though as they also saw this MOU as contributing to the balance of payments with the U.S. We'll wait and see. Mind you, LNGL don't seem to be in any hurry to issue the paperwork to shareholders saying it will happen sometime in March or April. They are however "pleased that the offer is a 72% premium to the value of S.P. prior to the trading halt." One could say it's more like about a 96% discount to fair value reached when Maurice Brand was running the show. How many hundreds of millions of dollars does it take to get every single approval in place and develop a company like we have over the years? I would have thought just by selling our OSMR technology alone would be worth more than what we're being offered for the whole business.
Back in the day Rene Rivkin always used to say the first offer price of a takeover is rarely the last and he was usually right so we may squeeze a few more cents out yet. Looks like this may be a somewhat drawn out process. I wonder what Seth Klarman feels about all this. His fund can afford it but it's not a good look, let alone ING having egg on their faces in such a short time too. A big loss of face for the Hong Kong company, not to mention money. It would be good to hear from some of our other more informed posters too such as
@Timbogold and
@jkerr7999 as they are probably our 2 most grounded posters. Might make us feel a bit better. No one is here to judge their or others' opinions, at this point we're still in this together with what could now be considered an unforgivable betrayal of years of support from honest shareholders.
