From fansnetwork.co.uk:
What appears to be Hitchins' main business is called Strait Oil & Gas (UK) Ltd. Rather like diversifying from comedy into agricultural services, Hitchins has moved from veterinary surgery into oil exploration in Georgia, that well-worn career arc. Although maybe not. He is described on the list of directors as a 'veterinary surgeon'. Should come in handy should an oil well break a fetlock.
Strait Oil's website,
http://www.straitoil.ge/ has a page on which you can view live streaming of what appears to be nothing at all, possibly snow, possibly just the camera is not working. There is a lovely picture of an oil well against the setting sun. As the company appears to have £3,000 of tangible assets, one wonders whose oil well this is, but I'm sure they will be happy to tell us.
Strait Oil is 60% owned by Red Emperor Ltd and Range Resources. By one of those weird Pompey coincidences, both these firms are represented by the same PR agency as Portpin, Tavistock Communications. Tavistock's website boasts of their role in takeovers, mergers and acquisitions. We asked them whether they suggested Alan Hitchins to join the consortium but their answer did not arrive in time for us to include in this piece.
Red Emperor shares are trading at £0.030 in London and their Australian price is at $0.047 Aud. Range Resources are doing better at $0.052 AUD and a whopping £3.28 on the AIM market in the UK, down from £16 earlier this year.
Range Resources does do some drilling around the world, often it seems in the environmentally disastrous field of shale gas, better known as fracking, hence their need to employ Tavistock. And if you do a bit of Googling, boy do they need their PR people.
But what of Strait Oil & Gas? Their quarterly report can be found here.Whilst there is lots of interesting stuff about geology, there seems to be no oil or gas. Strait Oil and Gas (UK) Ltd has managed to avoid one strike off by Companies House already and had to restate their accounts.
Their most recent accounts are qualified by their auditors BDO because of a failure to prepare group financial statements in contravention of the Companies Act 2006.
As far as we can see, Alan Hitchins doesn't even own a significant stake in Strait Oil. As discussed above, 60% is owned by Red Emperor and Range Resources and the other 40% by a hotch-potch of small companies, many based out of Gibraltar and on which there is virtually no information such websites, stock prices and so on.
In the year ending December 2010 Strait Oil show an operating loss of £283,097. For the first six months of 2011 it is £147,124. For each of the last two years their operating turnover is about £750,000, so these losses are significant and incurred purely because administrative expenses exceeded income. Alan Hitchin's salary is £72,000 pa. Their tangible assets are £3,391, according to a note in the accounts the value of PCs and so on. Its cash at bank is £201,164.
The company runs from what appear to be serviced offices - a postal address and a phone answering service in Jermyn Street in London - where the only oil is in the hair of the tailors. It seems to share the building with a shoe shop and an international pharmaceutical company. The other company who share this address is Range Resources of course, who own 20% of Strait Oil. Must be crowded in there, but at least if the oil spills on your shoes you can pop downstairs and buy some new ones.
Strait Oil and Gas is entirely reliant on shareholder loans to trade, £5m of which are repayable within a year. These loans will have provided the funds to purchase the licenses in Georgia, intangible assets of £10,693,208, described as 'Investments'. What they paid for them is open to question, because the value of the investments is for the company to determine. Whatever. The true value of a so far oil-less oil field in Georgia is this: the company has £200,000 in cash and £5m to repay next year. That is all very well, except for the fact that there appears to be no oil or gas. Better hope they hit a gusher soon...
One of Hitchins' fellow directors at Strait Oil between 2009 and 2011, rejoiced in the name Damian Conboy. He was struck off by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Following an investigation, ASIC found that Mr Conboy did not perform his duties efficiently, honestly and fairly and was not a fit and proper person to be a representative.
ASIC made the banning order after findings which included that Mr Conboy:
♦ excessively traded on clients’accounts which incurred debts
♦ breached ASX Listing Rules relating to the settling of trading
♦ traded on an unauthorised account
♦ incurred personal debts and failed to ensure clients settled within prescribed settlement terms
♦ lied to ASIC during its investigation
The full statement can be found here.
This was ten years before his involvement with Strait Oil - which means you have to question why Alan Hitchins would want to be on a board of directors with him.
Another person you might want to think about sharing a Board with is Mustafa Mutlu, a Turkish Cypriot, who is currently sharing a place in the Strait Oil & Gas (UK) Ltd Boardroom with Alan. The Independent in 1994 detailed some of Mr Mutlu's interesting past here which led to a British Peer, Lord Erskine, naming him in the House of Lords as being a director of a British registered company, Summit (Consortium) Limited, which was involved in organising an illegal arms deal with Azerbaijan. Mr Mutlu's British directorships are listed here.
Ethical issues aside, an arguably bigger question from a Pompey perspective is obvious. I am sure Alan Hitchins is a brilliant vet and will eventually strike oil in Georgia. However, if he represents a third of Mr Harris's consortium planning to 'invest' in PFC - and this is a man Keith 'knows really well' and can 'trust' - then it's hard to see where he has made any significant money. Certainly if the proposition is that he has millions of pounds to invest as pure equity then I would expect to see some big companies somewhere. If Hitchins is a rich man, his wealth is as subterranean as, well, a Joseph Cala casino.
As always, we would happily invite Mr Hitchins to talk to us about where the money for his takeover bid is coming from, but we haven't been able to track him down yet. If only we'd known he only works weekends clipping dogs' claws and such like. I'm sure Hitchins is a very nice bloke and decent human being - he certainly seems to be kind to animals, although we're not so sure about some of the human company he keeps - but Pompey fans have learnt over the recent past to be very sceptical of anyone whose source of claimed wealth is not immediately apparent.
