Dana Gas Appoints New CFO as Job Cuts Announced

Dana Gas has announced the appointment of a new chief financial officer, a day after its CEO confirmed that it would cut jobs at its head office in a bid to reduce spending by 50%.

In a statement released by the company on January 13, Dana Gas, which is focused on the Middle East and Egypt, said that Chris Hearne, who was previously chief financial officer and director of UK-based Serica Gas, had joined Dana Gas as its new chief financial officer. Hearne joined the firm on January 4.

The announcement follows the news that Dana Gas is cutting its workforce, particularly in Egypt and Kurdistan. Speaking at the Middle East Gas Conference 2016 in Abu Dhabi on January 12, CEO Patrick Allman-Ward said that the job cuts had begun in 2015 and will continue into early 2016.

"We’ve gone through an exercise once again of looking at our head office overheads, and we’ve taken action to cut those costs by 50%," Gulf News reports the CEO as saying. "We continue to look at our ongoing operating costs and operating ventures whether [they’re] in Egypt or Kurdistan to look at ways to cut out unnecessary costs from those operations."

The company has previously signalled that it is working to reduce its costs as profits fall. In November 2015, a statement by Dana Gas blamed an "extended period of low prices (...) combined with a consistently challenging global economic environment" for a drop in gross revenues in the first nine months of 2015. At that time, the company reported gross revenues and net profit of $324 million and $10 million respectively, a drop of $217 million gross revenue and $119 million profit on the same period in 2014.

As a result, the company said it was working to further reduce its costs.