It’s with a certain amount of ‘I Told You So’ that I pen this epistle….
There’ll be no wailing and gnashing of the teeth from Ascent Resources (LON: AST) shareholders at the demise of the God awful ‘Bushmills vampire’, Colin Hutchinson, finally receiving his much deserved metaphorical stake through the heart. I just hope that the ‘Slayers’ (new team) double checked the stake had gone right through when they sprinkled holy water over the corpse. Always best to be certain when it comes to Vampire killing…. Gleaned from watching the Netflix series, Van Helsing
So what next for the Slayers, Ewen Ainsworth, James Parsons and Leonardo Salvadori? Well with the cancellation of Riverforts $421,943 note into a two-year zero-coupon bullet payment loan, convertible at 7.5p per share when ASTs share price exceeds 10p per share for more than 5 days, which represents a potential 100% increase from last weeks placing price of 5p now makes AST a fairly comfortable trade/investment, you can buy at 4.p ish. However, that’s not why I bought in.
As most of you know, who follow my site and twitter, I’ve been a fierce critic of Ascent Resources. I know this company inside out and everything that’s happened to AST I’ve correctly predicted. Clive ‘carve ’em up’ Carver with his crusty sidekick, hapless Colin Hutchinson, destroyed the company. They had no regard whatsoever for their own genuine shareholders. It was never about getting the Slovenian gas asset into full production. Ascent became a ‘confetti machine’ for the likes of Darwin, Henderson Global et al.
The new team who came in last week are some of the corporates I was talking to on behalf of the defunct shareholder action group, set up 18 months ago. Suffice it to say that the market and value of the company has somewhat changed for the worse. Shareholders gave up. And who can blame them? But hope has now been revived
🧛♂️Bushmills vampire🧛♂️
Ascent are basically debt free, ‘Bushmills vampire’ free, generating limited cash from their gas production in Slovenia (which is at the moment mired in a legal controversy the ‘Vampires’, not only created, but failed to address) and now have a team that can sort the mess out. Make no mistake the ‘Slayers’ have already started the process of righting the AST ship. The word is that a delegation is heading to Slovenia pronto! Expect news on this shortly.
News has also reached ‘Yours Truly’ that the new team, pre taking control of the Company, have been in talks with several production/exploration cash strapped oilers, one being Humber Oil & Gas. You may know Humber as a partner in one of the biggest onshore O&G discovery’s in the UK: West Newton and have a stake in the soon to produce Wressle discovery. You may not know that they’re desperate for cash having paid all their West Newton drill costs. All their assets are up for sale. Including West Newton. Enter one Jon Fitzpatrick, (X Macquarie Capital) the negotiator rumoured to be working on behalf of the Lang family. At what stage any of these talks are isn’t known. But talks, there are. Now remember it’s your money not mine. That means investors/traders can buy, sell, hold, derisk or ignore at their own discretion.
If the new team had taken over 18 months ago the SP would probably have made it back to 2/3p. Fast forward today post the consolidation and placing, we have an SP of 4p ish with a resetting of the ‘stock clock’ to 46,196,484 shares in issue. The market cap’ is sub £1.8M. Once the corona virus ‘deflating’ effect passes & the spooked herd stop burning the house down, we’ll see an inflation, subject to sorting out Slovenia & depending on what comes into Ascent, 10p/15p, maybe more, looks achievable……
Now don’t let me have to write another ‘I told You So Epistle’ when it reaches 10p!
Ascent Resources (LON: AST) Yesterday plunged the knife yet again into their own shareholders via a huge discounted placing raising a piss poor £750,000. The last placing they tried was with Primary Bid ‘in the bolloxs‘ which failed to flog the full allotment, of yet again, hugely discounted shares hence why the residual shares that Primary Bid couldn’t sell were off-loaded yesterday to yet more so called ‘Institutional’ investors. This is a bare-faced lie.
There are no ‘Institutions’ investing in Ascent. Just as in the Henderson Global, Darwin Strategic, Lombard days of chicanery, so called Institutional Investors. And we all know exactly where these Institutions are right now. Gone, vamoosh, scarpered with the loot after selling off all their heavily discounted shares leaving you the mug punters holding the CONfetti.
Gobshite Taking Cash To Ramp
Ascent has now hit rock bottom and is having to use ‘bottom feeder’ bucket shop finance. The new improved ‘Institutional Investors’ are in actual fact a small group of well known ‘Vulture’, one man band corporate flippers. Who will be ramping to fook on twitter, Total Market Shite, ‘Gone for a Burton’ and various BB threads under anonymous names. My sources tell me that one of the flippers is planning to flip out every time he’s showing a 15%-20% gain. I could name that individual but it would compromise a source. But he’s a well known corporate shyster who works in cahoots with twitter cowboys and is a chum of the under investigation First Equity Broker Mr Miles ‘Vulture’ McNulty who recently ‘dearly departed’ from twitter due to said investigation….
Ascent are embroiled in a costly legal dispute with the Slovenian Government, have piss poor deteriorating production that needs several million in capex spunking away every year on top of huge corporate overheads. The business isn’t viable. Come the Ascent Resources AGM, the Articles Of Association will be changed to allow Hutchinson to issue an unfettered amount of shares below ‘par value’. This is going to result in massive, and I mean massive dilution with a consolidation of shares in issue. Funnily enough round about the time ALL the corporate flippers will have sold all their discounted stock back to the mug punters. If you hold this stock for any length of time you are going to be wiped out. The Board have a history of not giving a flying fook about their shareholders. It’s all about keeping the lights on via whatever finance they can get.
New Improved ‘Institutional Investors’
Now we all know that CEO Colin Hutchinson, was left holding the entrails of the AST corpse after Clive Carver & Co jumped the sinking ship, (pockets filled with pay & expenses leaving him to wind down the company) has to raise money to survive otherwise it’s lights off and good night Vienna but when CEOs deliberately masquerade Corporate flippers as ‘Institutional Investors’ knowing full well that they will deliberately pump & dump to the detriment of genuine long suffering share-holders then it is time for shareholders to sell up and move on, particularly when the fundamentals are as shocking as Ascents. The next placing in Ascent Resources is already being planned by their newly installed joint broker SP Angel it will come post AGM. Of course they’ll now deny it till blue in the face and they’ll try to drag it out for as long as they can. But my source is within SP Angel and has confirmed that they were taken on specifically to assist in another cash raise post AGM. So expect more horse-shit RNS’s to artificially raise the SP.
I wont go into the cash raised pre Jan’ 2017. Otherwise I’d be here all day! Suffice it to say that AST has spunked away circa £40,000,000 pre 2017. Since January 2017 Ascent resources has raised £14,235,271. 2017 & 2018 production generated circa £2M in revenue. Production has steadily fallen. Last figure was circa £35K for March 2019. Down from an initial high of circa £200k per month.
Failure
Ascent resources has basically spent £7,000,000 per year to generate circa £1M. As a business that is unsustainable. Which is why Hutchinson is now grabbing low level bottom feeder finance. The Petisovci gas field is in terminal decline. It needs, and will always need, expensive workovers to deliver small gas. The Capex by far out-stretches the revenues generated which is why during the Strategic Review no fooker would touch it. It’s production will never get into the black. In what business would you invest £7,000,000 per year to make £1M? The talk of ‘Workovers’ is very apt here. It’s you the AST shareholders who are and will continue to be worked-over by Ascent Resources. Production has all but ground to a halt and the cash-burn will have to increase. Enter the latest batch of corporate shyster finance.
Talk of a new direction and new assets is a ‘Jackanory’, a white elephant. There’s no money for new assets. It’s a fig leaf to lessen the disaster that is the Petisovci field and the continual rape of UK Investors. This is only going one of two ways and that is administration/delisting or another team comes in and wipes out (again) share holders while heralding a new dawn…. We’ve all seen it many, many times. It never ends well.
“Mother Hubbard there’s nothing in the cupboard” So goes the sad sorry tale of Ascent Resources (LON: AST). Today’s 7am RNS announced accounts for the year end December 31 2017. The problem was that the accounts were not released within the RNS and directed investors to their website which funnily enough never had the accounts on. READ ACCOUNTS HERE
Now call me a cynic! ‘You cynic Levi!’. But surely if an RNS states that the accounts are on the company website then that is where they should be. But no. Several calls to the AST Nomad, Aim reg team with a follow up email seems to have done the trick. Accounts in all their gory details now on the website 3+ hours late and no wonder why….
I Want Your Cash! Again & Again ad infinitum to pay my fees for failure…
The accounts lag behind real-time by some 5 months. It’s glaringly apparent that Ascent Resources are close to the bone and running on fumes. The cash burn is what’s important here. £1,032,000 in Directors/Employees remuneration, £1,966,000 loss for the year with a measly £699k left in cash as of 5 months ago which doesn’t reflect their £210,000 of liabilities 5 months ago.
Serial Failure…. Gave himself massive pay rise.
So let’s be generous ’cause I’m a real generous type… Directors/Employees Remuneration is running at circa £1,000,000 per year. Five+ months have since elapsed so circa £500,000 as per their D/E Remuneration cash burn has now been paid but’ lets only take off £400,000 from their cash position that leaves them £299,000. Hang on I here you AST trolls scream ‘we’ve got revenue now!!!’ ‘Ok’ say I, I’ll add that in… The Ascent gross margin was £411,000 that is to say the actual cash received and held by AST. So you have £411,000 per year but your running at a £2,000,000+ loss! Ergo there’s a £1,600,000 funding gap that has to be bridged to survive this year!!!
Old Mother Hubbard LOL!!!!!
Where is that money coming from because it’s not coming from the production is it? Production is declining because there isn’t the cash to spend on it. What an absolute fooking mess the corporate shysters carve ’em up Carver & Hutchinson have made. They’ve cleaned the company coffers out and annually trouser hundreds of thousands of pounds while awarding themselves huge pay increases for failure. You can be sure of one thing whatever happens to AST these corporate shysters will continue to bleed it dry until they are booted out of the company.
Ascent Resources are running on fumes and regardless of what these two fookers are spinning to you, the mug punters, if they don’t raise cash and raise it quickly then they will be insolvent. Massive Discounted Placing on the way as sure as night follows day! And guess who will be getting the discounted stock? Come on down Mr Henderson and Mrs Darwin. with their bastard child Primary Bid in the bolloxs!!!
I’ve been very quiet on Ascent Resources (LON: AST). Hoping that the SP would rise. Sadly it’s not. It’s just drifting. I’ve noticed a cacophony of wild bleating coming across my social media platforms by various ill-informed crack-pots. So let’s get it all out in the open. Shall we?
Clive Blames 6 week ‘SHAG’ for his 6 years of failure!
Now I’m going to make myself very clear. Indeed crystal clear. The Company are where they are because of years of shockingly bad management. Colin Hutchinson and the greedy corporate shyster that is Clive Carver have ‘Apparently’ told investors in the one way investor conference call (the put up job where no fooker can ask questions and basically all questions are screened) that the abysmal SP is because share-holders have joined a share-holder action group with a ‘criminal element’.
Now if that doesn’t take the biscuit as the biggest crock of corporate bullshit ever spoken in the history of AIM then I’m best mates with Donald Trump!
I’ll remind ALL AST investors and long-term holders. Clive Carver was put into AST by Henderson Global. Mr Carver is or was Chairman, he’s now a Non Executive Director of Darwin Strategic, a Vulture Finance outfit owned by Henderson Global. They take discounted shares and forward sell them into false rises created specifically with the connivance of the company! That is what they did during every single Equity Finance Facility (EFF) they issued with every single company daft enough to sign up for an EFF, a Death Spiral.
This is how an EFF worked. For 15 days traders at Darwin would secretly flood the market with shares in false rises deliberately orchestrated by the company. For 15 days the company would over-promote through RNS, paid for articles, videos, podcasts and presentations. This was done to deliberately sucker in gullible investors so that Darwin could sell stock at inflated prices into the liquidity. Then ZAP! RNS drops announcing a drawdown. A dilution. Darwin would take their cut and then pass the cash onto the company. The regulators put a stop to the Darwin EFF’s.
Darwin then had to come up with another solution to allow them to carry on. Take a bow Primary Bid. Primary Bid is the bastard spawn of the EFF, Darwin and Mr Clive Carver. That is a fact.
Mr Carver elevated Colin Hutchinson to the position of INTERIM CEO. The shares in issue were circa 1Billion. The share price was 32p-34p when Mr Carver took control and was installed by Henderson. It is now 1.5p! Virtually every single placing and virtually every single Convertible Loan Note have been issued and converted by Darwin/Henderson. They have made tens of millions of pounds while Long Term Holders (LTH) have been wiped out. If you had bought 1,000,000 shares on the day of Mr Carvers stewardship you’d have paid £320k-£340k. Those shares today would be worth £15k.. Yet we have a Board that issues themselves performance options!!! By what stretch of their imagination do they believe they are entitled to issue performance/bonus options, bearing in mind the absolute abysmal, historical raping of the company? Their management has been a disaster for share-holders. That’s because they are not Oil & Gas savvy. They’re corporate financiers and they couldn’t give a flying fook about their shareholders. Shares now in issue fast approaching 3,000,000,000.
CEO ‘Jelly Fish’ Ducked out of presentation.
Yesterday Colin Hutchinson spent circa £5,000 on shares! That should tell you all you need to know. I hold shares in this company and regardless of the consequences of my telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, investors need to wake up. Interim is 6 months it is not 5/6 years. Mr Carver gets paid by AST and receives payment from Darwin and bonus payments from Darwin. That is a massive conflict of interest and needs to be addressed. Mr Carver runs Ascent Resources. Mr Hutchinson is a spineless Jelly Fish. A CEO who ran away from a presentation because he knew I would be there to ask tough questions on behalf of the AST Shareholder Action Group. He was instructed by the AST Board chaired by Mr Carver. That is a fact. A man who posts photos of £152 bottles of Bushmills whisky telling us all ‘Job Done’. What job have you done Mr Hutchinson? The share-price is tanking and it is going to remain ‘choppy’ because you’ve just told every man, woman and their dog that you need £10,000,000-£12,000,000 in finance to build a gas processing plant. Pray do tell us all where and WHO you are going to get £10,000,000-£12,000,000 from?
What is happening here is this. The company is imploding specifically because they are being used as a trading vehicle by Henderson/Darwin. Not because of an action group peopled by good honest LTH’s. To try to deflect away from their disgraceful connivance with Vulture Financiers, by using Black Propaganda blaming the 6 years of dilution and tumbling SP on a 6 week old Action Group is testament to the desperation of a Board that have been exposed as inept and deceitful. That Mr Carver is the only ‘Criminal Element’ involved or associated with OUR company. Share holders own AST Not you!. This board couldn’t run a toffee shop.
LTH’s are selling up and leaving in droves. This is because Mr Hutchinson is using well-known pump & dump promoters such as London South East and Vox Markets, who by the way have Darwin Traders as their share-holders. What a coincidence….. I emailed Mr Hutchinson several months ago telling him that if he continued to run promotes with pump & dump promoters then the P&Ders would attach themselves onto the company and LTH’s would suffer. Ascent resources are losing their LTH’s because of the Vulture financiers who are sucking the life blood out of the company and because of the increased volatility P&Ders are causing. That is a fact.
I also emailed Mr Hutchinson regarding my sources, telling me he was in talks with Henderson/Darwin BEFORE the recent placing. Hutchinson stated that I was wrong and he was not talking to Darwin/Henderson and was not raising cash. Weeks later he placed £1.5M with Darwin. I say Darwin because Primary Bid doesn’t exist it is a paper shell used to mask Darwin’s vulture finance. Operated out of Darwin’s office.
Now at the moment there’s a lot of horse shit on those well-known P&D troll infested platforms posting utter cock about myself going on the AST board etc. That is yet again more deceits being perpetrated to scare away LTH’s from the Action Group. No doubt that some of these BB LSE Trolls are being quietly briefed by Mr Carver & Mr Hutchinson. A Dirty tricks campaign against a shareholder who speaks out And tells it as it is. If you want to continue to conduct a dirty tricks campaign then be preferred for retaliation.
Those that know me also know that I am deemed persona non grata by the regulators. I have no chance whatsoever of ever getting on an AIM listed board. That is a fact.
However, as a share-holder I am fully entitled to be part or any share-holder action group and legitimately seek change for the benefit of ALL share-holders. Hence the Ascent Resources Action Group. And I can tell you ALL now there is not a cat in hells chance of the present Board ever achieving any thing other than failure. That is their record. Total Failure. They are not Oil & Gas people. And ladies and gentlemen that is well-known and mooted by many professionals in the City of London. Both of these chaps have ‘strung along’ AST shareholders for years! It is no coincidence that the massive over promotion was conducted as the CLN’s were being converted. How convenient was that for Henderson to sell ALL their CLN’s then take part in another placing?
There are people who the Action Group are talking too. Genuine Oil & Gas big hitters who could turn this company around within months, who are willing to assist Ascent Resources to get to where they should be. That is as a successful oil and gas producer with an SP at multiples of where it now languishes. These corporates have got their feet under the table and do not want to relinquish their fees and expenses. This would mean that Mr Carver and the two Directors, who are nothing but Ghosts, would have to step aside and allow ‘others’ proven Oil & Gas corporates onto the Board.
If the Board of Ascent want help then they only need to request a meeting with the Action Group and we will gladly arrange a tete a tete for them.
In the meantime I respectfully suggest that if you are a P&Der then you can go and fook spiders. If you are a genuine LTH then join the Action Group. That is the only way you can have a legitimate say in YOUR company.
This is the Man responsible for every Henderson, Darwin & Primary Bid AST Dilution! Time to go Mr Carver!
This is a call to all Ascent Resources (LON: AST) shareholders. Todays RNS is yet another kick in the teeth by a Board who’ve decimated the company SP by allowing wholesale slaughter of their very own sticky shareholders at the hand s of Darwin Strategic, Primary Bid in the bolloxs! Lombard and Henderson Global. Do not be fooled by the various names being used to dump cheap placing shares into the market. These are subsidiaries of Henderson and the Ascent Chairman Clive Carve em up Carver is the chief rogue. Clive Carver is the Chairman of Darwin Strategic. He gets paid by Darwin Strategic. He is massively conflicted. This man has to go! Where is the O&G experience on the AST BOD? They are financiers the lot of them! Which is why a full strategic review is needed! Make no mistake this Board doesn’t give a flying fook about its share-holders! It’s all about creaming it in for themselves and their corporate chums!
Clive Carvers Puppet on his Darwin string! CEO Colin Hutchinson.
Join the Ascent Shareholder Action Group. If you are a genuine investor then it is time to get organised and exert your influence on this Board. AST shareholders need a voice. We are close to 3%. Once we get there we will agitate for change. This Board have no ‘skin in the game’. You as share holders do! Regardless of what you think of myself this group is for the benefit of YOU! Join Up!
If you want to join up then please email [email protected] Provide your Name, Address, Holding and a contact telephone number. Value accretive Change is coming to Ascent so make sure your voice is heard!
Today I am launching the Ascent Resources (LON: AST) Shareholder Action Group. If you are a genuine investor then it is time to get organised and exert your influence on this Board. AST shareholders need a voice.
If you want to join up then please email [email protected] Provide your Name, Address, Holding and a contact telephone number. Change is coming to Ascent so make sure your voice is heard!
It’s with a certain amount of ‘I Told You So’ that I pen this epistle….
critic of Ascent Resources. I know this company inside out and everything that’s happened to AST I’ve correctly predicted. Clive ‘carve ’em up’ Carver with his crusty sidekick, hapless Colin Hutchinson, destroyed the company. They had no regard whatsoever for their own genuine shareholders. It was never about getting the Slovenian gas asset into full production. Ascent became a ‘confetti machine’ for the likes of Darwin, Henderson Global et al.
Viva
