Nedlands-based Empire Oil & Gas NL aims to raise $2.3 million to fund further petroleum exploration and contributions to discovery well testing costs, in a placement to be arranged by South Pacific Securities Pty Ltd.
The full text of an Empire announcement is pasted below
The Directors of Empire Oil & Gas N.L. ("Empire") agreed, on Friday 3 August 2007, to appoint South Pacific Securities Pty Ltd ("SPS") to place 287,000,000 shares in Empire at an issue price of 0.08 cents per share to raise $2,296,000 with investors who qualify under one of the exemptions in section 708 of the Corporations Act. As such no disclosure document is to be provided to them.
The Placement is conditional upon Empire's shareholders ratifying previous issues of shares at a general meeting to be held not later than 15 September 2007, to enable Empire to issue sufficient shares to facilitate the placement under the ASX Listing Rules. If Empire's shares trade on the ASX for a full trading day at less than 0.08 cents or the Dow Jones index falls by more than 15% at any time up to the date of the general meeting any of the investors may withdraw from the Placement.
The funds raised will be used for petroleum exploration and making provision for contributions to any completions and production testing costs of discovery wells in the 2007 drilling programmes in the Canning and Carnarvon Basins and also to provide additional working capital for the Company.
The issue price of 0.08 cents is a discount of 5.9% to the 30 days Volume Weighted Average Price ("VWAP") which is 0.85 cents. The 30 day VWAP period from 2 July to 3 August 2007 was considered an appropriate benchmark for the purpose of calculating the discount due to the current market volatility over the past week.
The Company looks forward to reporting the drilling progress of both the Valentine-1 and Stokes Bay-1 wells in EP 104 and R1 Canning Basin, Western Australia to be drilled during the months August and September 2007. These are Empire's next wells prior to its drilling programme in the Carnarvon Basin.
