News: Mosman Oil & Gas asks MEO shareholders to accept offer

Mosman Oil & Gas (LON:MSMN) has sent a letter to MEO Australia (ASX:MEO) shareholders urging them to accept Mosman’s takeover offer.

Mosman has made a takeover bid for MEO, offering one Mosman share for every 10 MEO shares. The offer is open until 5:00pm (WST in Australia) 24 March 2015, unless extended or withdrawn.

Mosman’s executive chairman John Barr said MEO shareholders would not need reminding of the massive deterioration in the market value of their company over the last few years, and its diminishing cash pile.

Barr said MEO currently faces the prospect of having no choice but to relinquish or farm-out its key permits as a result of it having insufficient funds to undertake exploration activities in its own right.

The directors of MEO have “belatedly announced” that they are implementing a range of cost cutting initiatives intended to reduce corporate overheads, Barr noted, and he sympathised with those shareholders who ask "why not earlier?" and those whose sentiment is simply "too little, too late".

“The board of Mosman is of the opinion that the directors of MEO should not be provided with the opportunity to ‘wash their hands’ of MEO's underperformance and failures and that MEO shareholders should entrust the management of MEO (via a combination with Mosman) to the Mosman directors by accepting the takeover offer,” Barr said.