I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.You would...

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

You would definitely not see both JV partners agreeing to suspend their contracted development program and enter into the sale process unless the offer was attractive. In business, every asset is potentially for sale if the offer price is good enough. We can assume they got a compelling offer that promised to beat their "reserve price" for the lease.

What we are in right now is just due process where they have to demonstrate that the best possible offer was reached and no value was left on the table.

I wonder how relations between the JV partners were going before the offer came around? It's safe to say the lease was not performing to people's highest expectations. You never know if there was friction between the two companies, if there were difficult personalities in the mix, whatever. You can easily imagine a scenario where different parties have different ways they want to run things. In that case, an easy solution would be to acknowledge irreconcilable differences and sell the asset for some third party to run.

I've never been completely satisfied with AZZ management's level of disclosure. I've always felt they chose to use the most optimistic figure available, and any issues were covered over where possible.

It was obvious the daily production rate after 30 days was low, but you usually had to estimate that figure out of their averages, where they included the initial/flush production into the average.

Mstol's figures are a bit optimistic because they include wells on initial production with higher flow rates and extrapolate across all wells.

I expect the sale, if it does proceed, will be at a decent price (higher than the 48c per share we were sitting at before the trading halt). However, there will also be large latent selling pressure brought to bear as soon as the announcement happens. Plenty of people can't wait to quit AZZ and move on to the next opportunity.