National oil company Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) said it has not put in a 1.71bil (RM8.49bil) cash bid to buy Heritage Oil Plc, an independent upstream exploration and production company listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).
Petronas has never made a cash bid for Heritage Oil based in the United Kingdom, it said in a statement issued to StarBiz yesterday, following a foreign news report that Petronas would look into buying Heritage Oil.
UK's Daily Mail reported on Thursday that Petronas would soon put in a cash bid of 1.71bil to buy Heritage Oil, which would give it exposure to relatively low-risk exploration fields in Iraqi Kurdistan and Malta in the near term.
Any cash offer for Heritage would have to be agreed by chief executive Tony Buckingham, who sits on 29.7% of the (company's) equity, the report said.
The Daily Mail said Buckingham had pocketed 84.5mil in August after announcing a 1-a-share special dividend with the firm's 50% stake sale in a series of oil exploration assets in Uganda and would reap a further 51mil-plus should Petronas make a bid to buy Heritage Oil.
According to Bloomberg data, Heritage Oil's market capitalisation on the LSE was some 1.2bil yesterday.
The Daily Mail report also said Petronas president and chief executive officer Datuk Shamsul Azhar Abbas wanted to make a statement and buy something big, after Petronas lost out to Korea National Oil Corp's 1.8bil bid to buy Britain's Dana Petroleum Plc.
However, Petronas said it had never bid for Dana Petroleum.
Meanwhile, when contacted by StarBiz via email yesterday, Heritage Oil said it does not comment on market speculation.
Heritage Oil has a main listing on the LSE and a secondary listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its core activity areas focus on Africa, the Middle East and Russia.
Its exploration projects are in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Malta, Pakistan, Tanzania, Mali and the Republic of Congo.
According to the group's website, Heritage Oil was awarded a production-sharing contract (PSC) in Kurdistan by its government in 2007 and was appointed operator of the Miran Block in the southern part of Kurdistan. The licence area covers 1,015 sq km.
The website also said there was huge potential in the Kurdistan region for undiscovered hydrocarbons, estimated by the US Geological Survey at 40 billion barrels of oil and 60 trillion cu ft of gas.
Heritage Oil also entered into a PSC with the Maltese government in 2007 for a 100% interest in Areas 2 and 7 in the south-eastern offshore region of Malta. The licences cover some 18,000 sq km.
Petronas did not say in the statement if it would consider a proposal to buy Heritage Oil in the future.
