new venture opportunities

In business, if you have a lot of cash (like MEO) then you are the king. But you should be looking to invest that cash in business again. Otherwise there is no meaning of holding cash just for being called as a kin. A business should be researching new investment areas and creating profits from the business activities all the time for a healthy growth. It should even create some debt with a reasonable debt/asset ratio for a bit of aggressive growth.

That's what MEO is doing atm. Jurgen said on openbriefing.com interview that "we commenced a more active New Venture screening programme and identified a number of attractive opportunities to add to our portfolio. Execution of one or more of these opportunities required us to complete the farm-in first". FIRB approval is close, coming soon.

Let's try to help MEO management for finding some new opportunities. (As they are reading this thread, they will be aware of the suggestions made here). Let's think about which companies can be taken over or which tenements of those companies could be attractive for us to buy.

For example I am thinking about MOG now. (:-) (I know.., it is the closest and easy target for someone to think about). Its market cap is only $20m atm. It is a bit in trouble for cash (even ASX is questioning their cash situation). And they are not good on technological works and farmout processes as much as they are good at grabbing a lot tenements on NWS long time ago and distributing the interest of them to a lot of companies.

We might think to buy its 15% share of Artemis, or their interest in WA-409-P in Carnarvon Basin, and WA-332-P, WA-333-P and WA-342-P. That would give us quite a bit of diversity on our exploration tenements. Some of those tenements have been already drilled, no gas or oil is found yet but there are a lot of data in hand. That data is considered as an asset and we are good to asses the drilling data as well. (Jurgen knows those things very well)

What else could it be, which companies could be keen to sell their O&G assets? (NSW tenements are preferred in deed)(:-)

As far as I know Nexus (NXS) has got some interesting tenements on NWS which might be interesting to look at;

WA-377-P Browse Basin (66%): The Echuca Shoals gas discovery in WA-377-P has the potential to contain up to 2 Tcf of gas in place with associated condensate. Nexus is actively working to farm-out equity in the permit to fund drilling activity and is currently in discussions with interested parties

WA-368-P Perth Basin (50%): Activity continued during the half-year to farm-out an interest in WA-368-P to fund drilling of the Yngling exploration prospect with a mean unrisked resource of 90 MMbbl.

NT/P66 Bonaparte Basin NT (100%): There was no activity during the half-year and all drilling commitments for this permit have been fulfilled.

A-424-P Browse Basin (100%): intention of farming out an interest before a commitment well is drilled in late 2010.