OilVoice - Dominion Petroleum Announces £32.7M Placing to Fund Exploration Programme in Uganda

Dominion Petroleum Announces £32.7M Placing to Fund Exploration Programme in Uganda

Monday, March 01, 2010

Dominion Petroleum, which has exploration interests in Central and Eastern Africa, announce that it has raised £32.7m (approximately $50m) through a planned placing of new ordinary shares, subject to an Extraordinary General Meeting, with a broad range of established institutional investors ('the Placing').

As a result of the Placing, 654,880,000 new ordinary shares will be issued to new and existing shareholders at a price of 5p per share.

The money raised from the Placing will be applied towards funding Dominion Petroleum's drilling programme in the highly prospective Exploration Area 4B ('EA4B') in Uganda as well as acquiring seismic in the emerging East African margin play of Offshore Tanzania's Block 7.

As previously reported, according to a report by Energy Resources Consultants Limited, EA4B in Uganda contains mean unrisked gross recoverable resource of 378 MMbbl (net 359 MMbbl to Dominion). Activity in the offshore East African margin is ramping up also with the announcement of a significant discovery by Anadarko Petroleum offshore northern Mozambique last month.

Andrew Cochran, Chief Executive of Dominion Petroleum, commented:
'We decided to raise these new funds to enable us to expedite an active and extremely promising exploration and drilling programme at higher working interest levels.

'Suitable drilling and seismic equipment is already available in both Uganda and Tanzania such that we should be able to implement the programme within our accelerated timetable.'

Dominion already has authority to issue 93,400,000 new ordinary shares, pursuant to resolutions passed at the Annual General Meeting held on 8 September 2009. The funds from these shares, totalling £4.7m, are expected to be received on or around 5 March 2010. The issue of the remaining 561,480,000 new ordinary shares requires approval from existing shareholders at an Extraordinary General Meeting ('EGM'), to be held on or around 23 March 2009.