Shares in Purpose-listed Pantheon Sources slid on Monday after a report that brief vendor Muddy Waters Analysis had wager towards the corporate.
Inventory in Pantheon, a US-focused oil and gasoline explorer, fell as a lot as 20 per cent early on Monday in London. The inventory has since pared a few of its losses however remained down greater than 15 per cent in afternoon buying and selling.
The drop comes after UK newspaper The Occasions reported on the weekend that Muddy Waters Analysis, the outstanding hedge fund based and led by Carson Block, had taken a brief place on the corporate price £5mn.
Muddy Waters declined to remark.
The brief place could be the US hedge fund’s newest wager towards a UK-listed firm, coming nearly three years after it shorted shares in NMC Well being and raised questions over the group’s asset values, money stability, reported earnings and debt ranges. NMC, which owns and operates hospitals and clinics throughout the Center East, went into administration in April 2020.
Earlier than NMC, Muddy Waters additionally attacked London-listed litigation financing specialist Burford Capital.
Pantheon has pursuits within the Alaska North Slope basin spanning greater than 150,000 acres however is but to start industrial manufacturing. It reported a pre-tax lack of $5.9mn within the six months to the top of December.
In a submitting final week it mentioned it had acquired new North Slope leases of “roughly 40,000 acres”, with chief government Jay Cheatham saying the acreage “provides important useful resource potential to our current administration estimates of 23bn barrels of oil in place and over two billion barrels of recoverable useful resource”.
Shares in Pantheon stay up about 360 per cent since early 2020.
In an investor presentation in April, the corporate mentioned the Alaska North Slope was a “confirmed main oil province” and that there was “close to time period commercialisation alternative”.
Fraser Perring, founding father of brief promoting group Viceroy Analysis, has additionally raised questions on Pantheon, describing the corporate on Twitter as “too good to be true”.
Pantheon mentioned the corporate’s administrators “consider the oil area that they’ve found to be a really thrilling prospect, and so they trust of their statements”.
