Potts,Posting on NYE after a few drinks? Happy New Year to you!...

Potts,

Posting on NYE after a few drinks? Happy New Year to you! I have never blamed anyone for a poor investment decision that I have made. FYI- I sold out of a significantly higher $ investment (10*higher than my current $ exposure) in NWE at circa $0.06. Currently I have a much smaller holding at a cost of $0.03. I share the widely held view that NWE seems to be run like a private company with no accountability (a problem within small cap ASX listed companies in my opinion). If during your annual performance review you discussed 6 KPI’s and you met none of them, how would your employer view you? I, you and all the other NWE shareholders are the employers of NWE staff. Their function is to provide us with a return on investment. As most of us are underwater in a major way they have failed dismally in doing that. If acceptable progress has been made by the company why has it lost 80% of its market capitalisation during the past 12 months? It is either not making acceptable progress or it is poorly communicating the progress. The Arrowsmith field is in a market with buoyant gas prices and a demand/supply imbalance so you cannot blame the poor gas price or market fundamentals for the share price destruction of this company.

Edison have referred to a CR requirement in FY 2014 (within 6 months). The company has highlighted that it needs cash and listed a number of generic options. There is now a very real need for positive sentiment enhancing information flows during the next few months and others have very appropriately pointed out that they see no near-term catalysts for sentiment to change. How is all the proposed (unfunded) activity happening in Q4 2014 or Q1 2015 going to lift the SP during the next 6 months? There may be other companies that see the value in NWE that you do? If they do they are not going to fork out big bucks to participate at the project level when they could easily take NWE out in its entirety for under $20m. If AWE thought that NWE was worth $100m don’t you think they would take it out? Of course they would. They have done very well out of their USA shale investment and could find $25m without blinking. FYI, some time ago I had a long chat with a senior manager of AWE and I mentioned the hype in NWE circles and he cautioned me against believing the positive spin that was coming out of the NWE camp about Arrowsmith as “there was a long way to go.”- a very appropriate warning.

Can you point out the near term catalysts (H1 2014) that you see turning this company around? For me, NWE is a questionable investment that I made. I don’t blame anyone for that but myself. I would, however, like to see some accountability by NWE management for returning some shareholder value to me and the entire share register, including you for that matter. You may think that PM is worth $400k pa for destroying your net wealth? I would like to see him reinvest $200k pa into Norwest shares to show that he means business. If he prefers to hold BHP shares or real estate in Subiaco instead, that tells me plenty about what he thinks of NWE!

“There are no negatives coming out of NWE”- why should there be? If NWE achieves nothing next week, PM’s $8k income will hit the books, the same the week after etc. PM has earned $2m+ out of this baby and reinvested probably less than $200k of that into the company. What does he have to be negative about? He has done very well out of this company. Many would swap places with him tomorrow.

You have an interesting view of investing. I invest to make money. You seem to enjoy losing money and defending those who are responsible for your losses?

I hope that the company can pull something out of the bag during the next couple of months. I will benefit from that. You were last writing about averaging down at a SP of 1.8 cents from memory. If you did that your hard earned money has been depleted- a good investment? I think otherwise.