Looking Forward to Asia Acquisition Further afield, Jeff Chisholm's Pan Orient Energy Corp. (POE) added four cents to $1.03 on 1.26 million shares, after arranging a takeover and a spinout. The company will sell itself and its core assets in Thailand to the Malaysia-based Dialog Group Berhad for 78.8 U.S. cents a share. Its non-Thai assets, including a 71.8-per-cent interest in private Canadian oil sands explorer Andora Energy, will go to a newly created company, CanAsia Energy, to be owned by Pan Orient's current shareholders and led by its current management.
The deal keeps a promise that Pan Orient made about eight months ago, when it vowed to explore a "new direction." It began marketing its Thai assets -- as well as the Canadian ones, though clearly that did not pan out as far as Dialog Group Berhard was concerned -- and said it would "pursue international oil and gas opportunities with a substantially scaled-down cost structure." The combined takeover and spinout transaction will accomplish part of that goal while putting some direct cash in shareholders' pockets. Subject to shareholder approval, management expects to close the deal in mid- to late August.
After that, management will turn its focus to CanAsia, and to finding and closing an acquisition in order to bring the "Asia" part of its name to fruition. (It seems that, for CanAsia just as for Pan Orient, the Canadian assets in the oil sands will be mostly an afterthought.) It will have $7.1-million in working capital to start its search.
While Pan Orient had not previously specified where it was seeking "international oil and gas opportunities," the fact that it has clearly chosen Asia is no surprise. Southeast Asia is where CEO Mr. Chisholm has spent most of his career, even before he took charge of Pan Orient way back in 2005. Before that, he was the main geoscientist at the once-prominent Niko Resources when it was making sizable gas discoveries off the coast of India. Niko is not prominent anymore, except perhaps in discussions of the worst market flame-outs. The now-delisted stock spent 2010 to 2019 tumbling from a high of $115 to exactly one penny at the time of its delisting -- a 99.99-per-cent plunge in value