Bowleven faces investor call for strategy overhaul and new board
Crown Ocean Capital seeks return of cash to investors from oil and gas explorer
Bowleven is facing calls to oust the majority of its board and overhaul its strategy by a Monaco-based investor that has amassed a 13 per cent stake in the Africa-focused oil and gas explorer.
Crown Ocean Capital, an investment group set up in 2007 by two German financiers, Christian Petersmann and Konstantin Stoyanov, is pressing Bowleven to remove six members of its seven-strong board, including chief executive Kevin Hart and chairman Billy Allan.
Crown Ocean wants Bowleven to change from an explorer and production company into a holding group and return excess cash to shareholders.
Edinburgh-based Bowleven, which has operations in Cameroon, had a cash balance of $99m at the end of October last year. The investor will release a statement of its demands to the London Stock Exchange later on Tuesday.
Only David Clarkson, a former BP executive who joined Bowleven’s board in 2013 and who serves as its chief operating officer, would survive should Crown Ocean secure sufficient backing for its demands from other shareholders.
The investor is seeking to appoint two of its own nominees to Bowleven’s board: Christopher Ashworth, a former partner at the law firm Ashurst; and Eli Chahin, a senior adviser at AlixPartners, the turnround specialists.
The call to overhaul Bowleven’s strategy is not the first time Crown Ocean, which has focused on technology companies in the past, has agitated for change at the oil explorer.
The company was forced to call a halt to its share buyback scheme at the end of last year when Crown Ocean voted against the move at its annual meeting. Bowleven had said in August last year that it intended to repurchase up to $10m of shares under the programme.
Crown Ocean also made a previous failed attempt to remove three of Bowleven’s non-executive directors, John Martin, Tim Sullivan and Philip Tracy. However, the proposals were not put to the vote at Bowleven’s annual meeting as the requisitions submitted by Crown Ocean were deemed invalid.
Shares in Bowleven traded for as much as 810p in 2005 but have since dropped to 25p.
Bowleven had held a majority stake in Etinde, a project off the coast of Cameroon but in 2015 reduced its holding to 20 per cent through a deal with New Age, an Africa-focused oil explorer backed by the US hedge fund Och-Ziff and Russia’s Lukoil.