re: agm director election Hi CapmanI agree that specific...

re: agm director election Hi Capman

I agree that specific industry knowledge is valuable, but I don't think that is what the Hardman board is lacking. The current board has impressive credentials in that area and I generally think they have an excellent job.

My concern is that the board may have too narrow a focus that may result in them getting blindsided by something unexpected.

An example is the $US16M exchange loss they suffered this year. As a percentage of their actual expenditures this is a large sum, and although it has now probably reduced somewhat due to the recent appreciation of the U.S. dollar, it concerns me that their hedging strategies appear to have been fairly simplistic. I don't know what changes they have made since the accounts were finalised, but the approach of simply keeping your funds in the same currency as the expenditure you anticipate seems fairly dangerous when your accounts are stated in Australian dollars.

In light of the significant risk that the US dollar will depreciate significantly in the next 12 months, I hope that they have since reviewed this hedging policy. Once they start generating revenue in $US this exposure will not be such a problem, but the fact that the loss occurred at all indicates that someone in the company dropped the ball and the directors didn't spot it until it was too late.

On the technical side of the exploration business, don't underestimate what I know or what I am capable of understanding. My specialist areas of knowledge are computational geometry, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics and optimisation, and each of these subjects have areas of application in oil exploration.

Andrew Mason
http://hdragm.squarespace.com/