This is looking very bad!
Another junior in the Niger Delta is Johnathan More's Mira Resources Corp. (MRP), down a cent to four cents on 2.31 million shares. It has received a service-provider default notice from its joint operating partners at the Tom Shot Bank (TSB) field. Mira acquired a 48-per-cent interest in this field in early 2011, and since then has re-entered but failed to complete one well. This is hardly the top-notch technical service its partners expected from a company that once boasted it "only selects opportunities that are able to generate cash flow within a 12- to 18-month time frame." When chief executive officer More made that statement in summer 2011, investors might have taken him to mean that TSB would be producing by early 2013 at the latest. It is in fact nowhere near producing. Mr. More, as always, has an explanation: He blames the "challenging conditions" of the market for delaying Mira's financing efforts, and adds the default notice is non-compliant anyway, so no need to worry. This is a departure from his usual spiel about TSB, which involves talking up the field's more productive neighbours, such as an Addax Petroleum licence that produces 50,000 barrels a day. It is no secret the Niger Delta has a lot of oil. The trick is in actually finding it.
Mr. More was a "top producer" at Canaccord Genuity before retiring in 2008 to pursue stock promotion. At the time, Mira was a shell company, having just given up on its four-year attempt to make some money in the water-treatment technology business. Vancouver promoter and geologist Marek Kreczmer took over, but left in 2009 after failing to turn Mira into an oil and gas explorer in Mississippi. His replacement, Mr. More, attempted an oil and gas in deal in Ghana. When that fell through, he looked in Nigeria and finally found a promotable deal in TSB. Mr. More has one other public promotion, uranium explorer Aldrin Resource Corp. (ALN), unchanged at 8.5 cents.