On Friday afternoon, Regency Mines (LON:RGM) announced to the market that it had entered into an agreement with Oracle Coalfields PLC (PLUS: ORCP) to subscribe for 18,500,000 new Oracle Shares ("New Oracle Shares") at a price of 5.5 pence per share, representing approximately 10.04 per cent. of the enlarged issued share capital of Oracle.After very little activity on the corporate front for quite some time, Fridays news gave the market an indication that whilst things may appear to go quiet, the Company is not standing still.
We caught up with Regency's Chairman Andrew Bell over the weekend and put some questions to him about the Company's move into the Coal space. Here's what he had to say:
MM: With regard to your Oracle Coalfields announcement, could you outline how this transaction came about?
AB: We have been familiar with the Oracle story since before its listing in 2007. From time to time someone has told us how good it is. In November last year even my son, who had been researching it, told me. We always had reservations, about the grade, or our lack of knowledge of the coal industry, or being busy with other things, or having insufficient human or financial resource to follow our investment and take a practical interest.
We bumped into the Chairman, Tony Scutt, at a conference a short while back. He was chatting about something else, but said enough about Oracle to pique our curiosity and so we googled it again and did a little research. We were really impressed by how much progress there had been in the last year. Here was an asset with 1.3bn t of Measured Resource and nearly 400m t of Proven open-pittable Reserve, and Oracle had signed MOUs with the leading power company – Karachi Electric Supply – and the leading cement producer – Lucky Cement – and engaged top names such as SRK and Wardell Armstrong for the feasibility and environmental studies. And they had done the biggest raise on PLUS this year, involving placees who never, never invest in PLUS companies, and they were committed to going on to AIM, raising more money, and going into production in 2011/12.
And our first thought was "Wow! And they did all this when they were on PLUS, struggling to raise any cash at all, and never had much? Imagine what they…
