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    Ophir CEO Cooper Quits

Summary

In eight years at the helm, Nick Cooper transformed the company but he failed to conclude the potentially transformative Fortuna LNG financing.

by: William Powell

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NGW News Alert, Natural Gas & LNG News, Africa, Asia/Oceania, Europe, Corporate, Appointments, Exploration & Production, News By Country, Equatorial Guinea

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Ophir CEO Cooper Quits

CEO Nick Cooper has left the board of Ophir Energy with immediate effect, the company said May 18, but he will remain employee of the company until a short handover period ends.  His temporary replacement will be Alan Booth, a non-executive director until a new CEO is appointed.

The company said that Cooper's achievements as CEO, a role he took up in 2011, had been "considerable" and include leading the company through a successful initial public offering in 2011, realising value through selling part of its interest in Tanzania in 2013, the acquisition of Salamander in 2015 and, most recently, the proposed acquisition of Santos’ southeast Asian assets. He turned Ophir from a frontier deepwater explorer into a financially strong business supported by a robust production base, it said. 

But the company wants to rebalance its portfolio towards a larger production and cash flow base, to support more focused and sustainable exploration activity. "The Santos acquisition is an important step in this direction. The board will strengthen management operational capabilities to deliver this strategy, alongside continuing its plans to realise value from Ophir’s substantial discovered gas resources. The Board continues to focus on realising value for shareholders from the Fortuna project, and will continue to work with the government of Equatorial Guinea to develop this important resource."

Cooper said he was proud of what Ophir had achieved and a new platform has been built for new leadership to take the company forward. But analysts were not happy with the company's failure to meet its targets for financing the Fortuna LNG project off Equatorial Guinea (EG), for which the company had been 'pilloried', he said in an interview in March. The project, with its complicated partnership structure, remains unfinanced. Last week the EG government set a deadline of the end of this year for Ophir to take final investment decision on Fortuna, or else face losing operatorship or having the project scrapped.

(Banner photo credit: Ophir)

 

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