NIDO Petroleum executive chairman Charlie Morgan has upped his stake in the petroleum player by 2,828,684 shares in a buying spree that ran from September 16 to October 30.
Mr Morgan’s purchases increased his holdings to 29,503,308 shares at an additional cost of just $36,773.
The company encountered some bad news while Mr Morgan was adding to his stake, with US oil major Unocal pulling out of its deal to carry out a phased study of the Galoc oil and gas field off the Philippines, in which Nido has a 17.5 per cent stake.
According to a Nido announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange, mean oil-in-place volumes of 150 million barrels were not seen to be large enough for a company of Unocal’s size to proceed with a development.
Mr Morgan said he had taken the opportunity to buy up Nido shares while they were at 1.4 cents.
“The records will show that I also bought up a lot of Nido stock when the price was about the same,” he said.
Nido’s share price is currently sitting around 1.5 cents after reaching a peak of nearly 3 cents in August.
Mr Morgan said since Unocal had pulled out of the Galoc oilfield deal, Nido had been approached by several other oil players.
“We have about 2,200 square metres of 3D data. [Exploration manager] Joe Saloman has done a great job on the data as a one-man band but it really needs more than a one-man band,” he said.
“It needs about $1 million spent on it.”
