Couple of points (rather than counterpoints) - Staff Costs...

Couple of points (rather than counterpoints) -

Staff Costs
Executive salaries and non-exec director fees are ~$900k pa. The (cash) staff costs have basically doubled from last year's quarterlies, but a decent whack of salaries ended up as share-based pay so it doesn't appear staff costs have changed much. I'd like to know where the other ~$400k in staff costs are coming from but they don't appear to be off the chart. Annual report should shed some light.

For comparison, remuneration is slightly more than NWE, similar to WBE and less than that of BRU. That's at a glance. I'd like to see a better comparison of remuneration in the industry but for an oil producer, with exploration and development, a JV, and a significant investment to manage, staff costs appear cash draining but not unreasonable.

Given my view that we're going to scrape through this quarter and be looking much better by year-end I'm OK with cash payments rather than paying the staff in 8c shares. I can appreciate the cynical view though that the Board would rather cash than shares as they don't have confidence in their own share price.

Admin & Corporate
Last annual shows an admin expense of $3.8m, including $1.9m in arbitration costs. Removing this cost (Monterra payments finalised) shows we're expecting to spend similar again this year, so last year's breakdown may be relevant. Costs were:

• Audit & Accounting - $150k
• Consulting - $365k
• Legal - $350k
• Insurance - $500k
• Other - $250k

These are harder to compare, as they're more company-context specific, but for comparison, these are vastly more than NWE, more than WBE and significantly less than BRU.

For reference, BRU retains legal counsel at $500k p.a. $365k for consulting is interesting but also doesn't go far in engineering or corporate finance fees. The insurance cost jumps out as there's no real detail/breakdown of this in the annual and the mentioned comparatives aren't even close or don't itemise.