One of Hurricane Energy’s biggest shareholders has moved to have several members ousted from the company’s board with “immediate effect”.
The oil and gas business has received a requisition notice from Crystal Amber, requiring it to call shareholders general meeting to consider removing non-executive directors Steven McTiernan, Dr David Jenkins, John van der Welle, Sandy Shaw, Beverley Smith, John Wright and David Craik.
The board stated that it is considering the content of the notice and intends to respond soon.
Earlier in May, Hurricane Energy said it was set to agree a debt-for-equity swap that will leave bondholders with the bulk of the company.
Hurricane has around £165m worth of bonds which are due for repayment next year, so directors have agreed in principle to a deal that will see bondholders exchange much the debt owed to them for 95% of the shares in the company.
The deal would see existing shareholders almost wiped out, but directors said there was no other way of keeping the company afloat.
Last June, Hurricane's founder and chief executive Robert Trice resigned, replaced two months later by Anthony Maris, who was tasked with coming up with a new plan to increase production, while keeping capital expenditure down.
This followed chief financial officer Alistair Stobie resigning last February.
The company suffered a setback last year, suspending guidance of 17,000 barrels of oil per day after discovering that flow from one of its two wells interfered with the other.
The Godalming-based company - which has a base in Aberdeen - was established to discover, appraise and develop hydrocarbon resources from naturally fractured basement reservoirs.
Its acreage is concentrated on the Rona Ridge, in the West of Shetland region of the UK Continental Shelf.
Its Lancaster field claims to be the UK's first producing basement field, which Hurricane is pursuing a phased development on, starting with an Early Production System consisting of two wells.
It is an operation that was delayed in 2019, after ropes failed and snagged while trying to connect the Aoka Mizu floating production vessel, which had to return to the Cromarty Firth.
Hurricane achieved a stock market capitalisation of £1.2bn earlier that year, but that now stands at around £24m.
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