Prospex Energy Plc ($PXEN)

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Prospex Energy plc corporate update. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to the Chairman, Bill Smith. Good afternoon to you, sir.

Well, thank you very much, and thank you all for attending today. It's a real pleasure for me to introduce Tom Reynolds, the new CEO. Some of you may have had the opportunity to meet Tom, but not all. So this is a real opportunity for the company. Tom has a presentation that he's going to bring everybody up to date on his first few weeks, he's only been in the saddle for a little while, but he's been very busy. I think you'll find his approach to be quite refreshing. Tom, over to you.

Thanks very much, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone. As Bill says, I've been quite busy. I think if those of you that have been following the RNS material that we put out in the last few weeks, you'll know that I was visiting the Viura site last week, and it's really very interesting to see active gas plant in Spain and everything that's going on there. We'll touch on that briefly as we go through the presentation. But I'm conscious of time, and I want to make sure that a big reason for having us today was to give investors and prospective investors an opportunity for Q&A. So I want to get through the presentation material in pretty short order. What we've basically got here is a story in 3 parts, a reminder of the investment strategy and how we will make money. Second is to go into the assets and a brief update on each of those. And then we'll pull it all together with a bit of an outlook and forward look at how we go from here. So without further ado, let's get on with that. So investment thesis or investment criteria. For those of you that looked at the letter to the shareholders that was released a couple of weeks back, these will be quite familiar. And basically, what this slide describes is the 3 significant trends or dynamics that we're effectively trying to align with here in everything we do as a route to create value for our shareholders. The first is tying to real energy assets. And so these are assets that particularly during periods of monetary inflation will grow in value. Now on the right-hand column, you can see here how that refers to Prospex. And for us, we are investing in natural gas. It's an essential energy commodity with resilient value, particularly in inflationary times. The second theme is around resource sovereignty. Very much now every time you turn on the news, all of us are seeing stuff linked to Iran, Strait of Hormuz, the implications on not just energy commodities, but pretty much everything that derives from energy commodities. And we can see an impulse of inflation coming down the pipe because of the cost impacts that's going to have right the way through the economy. Resource sovereignty is a theme that we can see developing where assets and resources within a border and within a geographic enclosure will be seen as more valuable because they are there already and don't need to be transported in. Now for Prospex, what does that mean? Well, we have a European focus and all of our assets are within that geographical closure within Europe. And I believe that means that our assets will conduct or command a premium in terms of pricing going forward because of that ability to meet supply during periods of disruption. The third piece is intrinsic growth options. So at the asset level, at the micro level, each asset has to have a clear way of adding value. This is not just buy something, sit on it and hope it goes up in value. This is an active strategy involved in actively engaging with the assets we own and finding ways to grow resources and improve the value either through derisking, which is effectively appraisal and exploration, development, turning discovered resources into production or effectively maximizing the value of existing producing assets through improving efficiency. And I think what you'll hear as we go through the presentation here is a very clear path in each of those assets that we already hold to do exactly that. So a quick stop on value creation here. And I think I thought this was -- it would be useful to include and it's a little bit of a reminder about how you create value within natural resource assets and particularly natural gas or oil and gas assets. You can see the graph on the right-hand side here is a pretty traditional S curve, where you can see value on the Y-axis is represented here as cost per barrel, effectively a value metric on the Y-axis. And you can see phases of an asset's life as you go left to right across the chart here as an asset matures. What Prospex are looking to do is identify opportunities within the European gas market, which we can invest in either by investing in assets in companies or financial instruments, where there's a clear path to growing value. And I'm just going to talk about what that means in terms of this chart on the right-hand side. A number of our assets, you could plot them on this chart here. I didn't want to make it too busy, so left them off. But basically, just intuitively, you can look at this. We'll be talking about new licenses that have been offered to Prospex in Poland. They sit down at the bottom end of this chart. This is new acreage to us. And effectively, the first step will be to investigate and understand and identify prospectivity. So right at the bottom of the S curve. As we move up the curve, you can see where Romeral sits, although it has got some late-stage production from its first life, the 5-well drilling program we'll talk about in a minute, put in the middle of the curve with sort of appraisal exploration into production mode. And Viura sits in a similar position in that it's got existing production appraisal upside. I think a key point here is that each step of this curve moving up is defined as by milestone shown by the blue -- sorry, the yellow diamonds. And yellow diamonds represent a point in time where we, as owners of any asset, can take a view on whether we are the best person to take it to the next stage of life or whether we pass the ball to someone else. And effectively, you'll see this coming through loud and clear in the investment approach I hope to bring to Prospex is that every stage of an asset's life, we will assess whether we are the best owner going forward, and therefore, we should find the funding to take it to the next step or whether it will be better to effectively take value off the table, sell it to someone else who is a better owner. And then we can take that value and reallocate it to new or other interesting assets. So really just to round out on investment approach. These are sort of motherhood and apple pie statements about how we will work with each individual asset. And this is about discipline and making sure that every pound we spend on an asset has a clear intent in adding value. So first of all, each asset will be held and will have a clear specific investment objective. We're not going to be sitting and just hoping things go up in value. We will have a plan, and we will be executing on that plan. We'll update valuation of each asset regularly and understand how macro events are affecting the potential value of these assets. I've already mentioned the Strait of Hormuz and the impact that's had on TTF pricing. As a result, I believe all of the assets in prospects' portfolio, whether they are undeveloped or actively producing, have gone up. And then finally, any follow-on investment consistently and rigorously viewed through the lens of how does that add value for Prospex shareholders. That has to be our benchmark in everything we do. So in the green boxes, you can see very clearly the risked value of any investment will be tested to make sure it adds value for you, Prospex shareholders. All assets are considered available for sale at any time, subject to valuation, which takes account of upside. And again, that's a statement of obvious truth given what I've already said. Are we the best owner of this asset for the next phase of its life? And if so, we should raise that money and invest in it? Or would it be better in someone else's portfolio and it allows us to take value off the table and reinvest in our broader portfolio. And then final one here in funding incremental investment, we'll consider all forms of finance. And I want this point to land very, very clearly for everyone here. There's a number of different ways to finance investments in our portfolio, not just issuing shares to raise equity. And certainly, my job is to exhaust all of those other forms of finance before I turn to shareholders to fund activity. So a couple of quick slides before we get into the asset section. In December, Prospex was sitting with a very attractive set of assets, really interesting exposure to the European gas market. But as I think everybody would be aware, insufficient resources, both human and capital to advance all of these opportunities at a pace at which the company would like. It's AIM listed, no secured debt and a CLN raise, so a convertible loan note raise launched in December to fund near-term investments. The assets are well positioned across Europe with production in Italy in Po Valley, production at Viura in the north of Spain, El Romeral production to generate electricity and then a range of drilling-based upside in the southern assets and then the 2 licenses that have been applied for at that point, San and Dunajec in Poland. So very interesting portfolio, plugged into that European gas theme and the Board elected to introduce new leadership, which is why we're here talking today. I started on the 1st of February 2026 to introduce a new approach. Now fast forward to today, March 2026, I spent some time with the team, with our partners, with each of our individual assets and getting close to having a full review of all those assets and identifying a clear pathway for each, how do we get to value. Look through a resourcing plan, what does the company need if it was to pursue everything and do everything, and we then have to pick from that list and understand how we're going to resource it. We've also reviewed corporate and asset level costs. My job is to make sure the business operates as efficiently as possible and maximum amount of pounds go to invest in the assets. The CLN raise was closed out for those of you following the story, we announced our final close of the CLN a couple of weeks back with -- and where we basically held off all the money it was offered because it was oversubscribed, but that provided enough cash to meet near-term investments. In the background, I've been engaging with potential partners for Romeral. We'll talk more about that when we get into the asset section. Polish licenses, as announced earlier this week, they've been offered and accepted by the company, and the formal process will take a month or so to put those in our hands, and I'm going to expand on those licenses in more detail because I think there's a couple of very interesting opportunities for the business there. And as part of shareholder engagement, we're sitting here today, and we'll get to your questions as we go forward. So really, how does that translate into a lookahead for the balance of 2026? A few key priorities listed on the right, not an exhaustive list. We are going to be busy. But fundamentally, engaging with Spanish regulators about permits for Romeral and license status on Tesorillo and Ruedalabola. That's option -- that's action 1. Engage with prospective farm-in candidates on Romeral. This is about bringing other people's money into the asset to get activity moving. Review of Romeral drilling and development phasing and costs to optimize CapEx requirements. That's just good solid practice, making sure that we're using best-in-class estimates so that the CapEx for that drilling program and subsequent development of any discovered resources is optimized and minimized. And then the final piece on here is engage with prospective financial investors capable of coming alongside us. So this is consistent with the comments I've already made about exhausting all and any forms of finance as we go forward. And one goal, which is in the white box here and it is highlighted for a reason is that one of the objectives I have for this year is to demonstrate through bringing in alternative funding to new shareholders and prospective investors that activity within our assets does not automatically equal dilution. I think that's critical. We have to break that link that anything we do requires some form of rates. And that's about finding and applying alternative external funding to our assets. So I'm going to go into assets now, and we'll talk them through quickly. There's quite a lot of information here. I'm not going to talk to every bullet on every slide, but these slides will be available on the company's website afterwards. And of course, we'll be able to deal with any questions as they arise at the end. So Selva Malvezzi in the Po Valley, producing around 80,000 standard cubic meters per day at gross level, Prospex owns 37%. This provides substantially all of Prospex's cash flow at the moment, and it's got an active program to plan for and drill additional wells testing contingent resources on the license going forward. You can see at the very bottom of the slide here, there is an indicative time line. People will be aware that there's a seismic acquisition program ran end of last year. That seismic data has now been going through processing so that we can image the subsurface structures and effectively conduct well placement and design and positioning of wells to best test the resources we believe are there. The second half of 2026 is going to be dominated by finishing off permitting work, early-stage well design and also the production of our competent person's report, a CPR. So what that means is we get to the end of the year on this license, hopefully, with fully processed seismic, a much better image of the subsurface that leads into an updated competent person's report. So an independent review of the prospective resources on the license and its potential value and also third-party regulatory approvals to move forward with an active drilling program. Now key thing to say there is regulatory approvals. There are broad error bars on when and how they are finally approved, but current best estimate is the time line you can see along the bottom of the chart here. That would move us into first half design and procure for that drilling program and drilling commencing in the second half of '27 and potentially spilling into first half of 2028. We'll come back when we tie this all together at the end. But fundamentally, our core objective is to work very closely with the operator to progress the asset to the key decision point around the end of this year, looking forward to that drilling program. And I won't talk in great detail about what's on this slide, but this basically identifies the individual targets and the volumes that will be tested during that drilling program as we move forward. As you can see on here, the totals add up to over 4 individual Prospex, about 88 Bcf gross and around 32 Bcf net Prospex interest. So very material compared to our base and a very material upside to pursue. Turning to Tarba. The way I think about Tarba, which is our 100% holding of an energy company situated in Southern Spain in the Seville area. I think about this as 3 individual elements. The first is the electrical generation business, and this is the subject of this slide, and we'll talk about it in a minute. The second piece is the gas resources and the potential that remains to be drilled out, initially going to be tested by that 5-well program once we get permits. And then finally, the kind of higher risk but higher impact exploration potential that exists in the Tesorillo and Ruedalabola licenses, which we'll touch on. So starting with the electrical plant. Basically, what you can see here is pictures that I took during a visit to site in February. You can see just going around clockwise, you can see one of the well sites, which actually sits on the site of the electrical plant. You can see the generation haul immediately to the right. And then below is one of the distal well sites, which currently feed the plant. Going through the asset in particular, I think the key message that I would say about the electrical generation is that it was -- Romeral was originally developed as gas to power and the only way of generating income was to generate electricity and sell it to the grid. The plant had been operating on the last vestiges of the original gas development until in 2025, transformer failure meant that generation activity ceased. Just before I began working with Prospex at the start of February, a rental transformer had been sourced and was installed at the site that reinstated the ability to generate and export electricity. I wanted to make it very clear about the context we're operating in here. Generation capacity is limited by 2 factors. The first is that remaining gas production capacity from the existing wells is limited. And the second part is the Spanish wholesale electricity pricing for those -- a number of you will be very familiar with the electricity market in Spain, but there are large extended periods during every day when electrical prices are very low, if not 0, because of the domination of solar power on the grid, which means that there are short windows in each day where there is an acceptable price to sell electricity at, which is cash generative. When you combine that with physical limits around gas production, it means the generation activity is insufficient to cover all of Tarba's costs. So it contributes to Tarba overhead and Prospex basically has to invest on a continual basis into Tarba by a shareholder loan to support the broader reserve base or resource-based opportunity, which we'll talk about in a moment. So the focus for Tarba electrical piece is to maximize electrical generation, maximize the revenue that comes from, manage other costs to minimize those wells so we get the whole resource play moving, and we'll turn to that now. So the second part that I mentioned at the start there of Tarba Energia, El Romeral, which is the Miocene gas opportunity. And you can see here the 5-well program that has been talked about by the company for some time. The applications are lodged with the regulators to drill 5 wells and also to connect to the export grid to allow direct gas export. Those 2 permits were lodged on the minister's desk on the 5th of December. By the government's own rules, they have between 90 and 180 days to respond. However, in every case, those time lines aren't what's hit and there is error bars on when approvals can be delivered. In the near term, our focus is on obtaining them and also on identifying a farm-in partner. We hold 100% in Tarba and therefore, 100% in the resource upside at El Romeral. And it gives us the opportunity to test whether farming down from 100% gives us the flexibility to bring in a partner who can also fund the initial well program and get things going. And coming back to that core principle that we started at, that displaces the need for the company to come and talk to shareholders about issuing shares and potential dilutive effects that would have. In the meantime, as I've already alluded to, we're reassessing the project philosophy to make sure it's absolutely CapEx efficient, looking at different ways to drill the wells and phasing to optimize drilling wells and hooking up very quickly to production in any success, the case for cycle time. And then also in the background, there's something to bear in mind here is there's potential value related to depleted field structures, which could be connected to gas storage sites in the future, particularly once there's a connection to the local gas regional pipeline, which you can see on the map is the green line that runs southwest to northeast. And then finally, just to really finish off on Tarba, Tesorillo and Ruedalabola concessions are situated, as you can see on the map in Southern Spain. It's eerily very significant. Tesorillo, in particular, has a historic well dating back to the 1950s where gas got to surface. Very limited activity since then and the license are currently suspended, which means we can't actually engage in any exploration activity. Our key focus at the moment is to reengage with the regulators in parallel with all the other conversations we are having to support a potential restart of that investigative activity. And that's in line with an application that was actually made historically back in 2021 to do so. Two big licenses, different prospectivity on each. And very clearly, the objective here is to begin accessing the ability to get after work here. Turning to the north of Spain. Prospex owns 7.5% in HEYCO Energy Iberia, which is a company which owns around 96% of the Viura concession. A key thing for people to understand here is because of the way we own the interest of Viura minority shareholding in HEYCO Energy Iberia means that we have limited rights, have some influence, but not control over the operational plan, and we don't have access to the level of granular cost cash and every other sort of data that we would have in the businesses that we directly control. A key final point to make about the way that whole joint venture structure is managed is that any cash flow arising from production net to our implied interest is retained within HEYCO Energy Iberia and it's used for corporate requirements, including future CapEx. So when we come on to talk about consolidated cash, any cash associated with Viura is explicitly excluded from that analysis because it's not cash we can control and it's not cash that we can actively allocate to other parts of our portfolio. In terms of a status update on Viura, the recent visit, what struck me was this is a very well constructed, very well maintained and operated plant. In terms of the equipment on the ground, it's effectively pre-invested and ready for further work and further gas volumes to be brought on stream. What struck me was that on the 3-well site, which is situated away from the plant that you can see in the picture here is there's casing and other ancillary equipment and consumables that would support the drilling of 2 wells. So this business is largely pre-invested for any drilling activity to come. By way of status update, we've said in the recent RNS that production trials are being carried at the moment. That's to support the construction of the dynamic reservoir model, which then in turn will be used to support design and placement of any new wells that are done in the future. During January and February, because of the variable consolidations of those testing processes, the gas production averaged a little over 100,000 normal cubic meters per day of gas and 140 cubic meters of produced water. Now the key thing to take away from here is that those are not indicative of a steady-state operation. They correspond to states that were selected to inform the boundary conditions of the dynamic model that's being constructed. Our expectation based on conversations we had last week at the plant is that modeling work will have completed by the end of April, steady-state operational regime established and then we can start using that model for our partners in HEYCO Energy Iberia will be able to use that model to model a number of scenarios and move forward with the design work. So flowing from that, you can see at the bottom an indicative schedule of what happens at Viura going forward. We're looking for a steady-state operation to be reestablished after the initial period of modeling changes that were being seen recently. Second half of this year, preparation for drill 2027 is drilling. So a couple of key things to finish off on Viura. We are very happy with the asset. We are confident this represents an attractive opportunity for Prospex and basically working very closely with the operator to understand its plan as it develops. So final license we're going to talk about or final asset we're going to talk about here is the Polish licenses. For those of you following the RNSs, you will have seen that we announced on Tuesday of this week that the applications that have been in the pipeline for some time were now offered to us and we have accepted. There's 2 licenses, the San license and the Dunajec license. Both of these licenses sit in Southern Poland, shown here, San license. That corresponds to the Miocene gas play, very similar to some of the other assets we have in terms of the geological setting. Shallow gas is what we're targeting here. And effectively, just to draw out some of the positives that I see here is that you can see the geological trend shown by the red gas discoveries in adjacent acreage on the map we're looking at here. And you can see that trend running up from the southeast to the northwest. And it's -- in our view, we're going to be looking to see that trend continuing on to our block, and that's what we're going to be investigating. Another interesting thing about both licenses I'm going to talk about is there's been very limited activity since the year 2000 just because these areas were not licensed. And there's been a huge amount of technological innovation in both imaging, evaluation and exploitation techniques since that time. And we believe that by application of those techniques in looking at these licenses and potentially developing whatever we may find here, it could be real overlooked value. We've seen this in other provinces, and we hope that that's the case here. On the work program, very light levels of firm cost exposure, which are limited to an AeroGravMag survey to image some of the basin potential underneath the license and then a drill-or-drop commitment after 3 years. So we're in full control of our spend on both licenses and the initial firm budget is very modest, and we're in control of when we spend that over the next 3 years. So all those points apply to the second license, the Dunajec, you can see here. The map shows offset discoveries, substantial commercial in size. In addition to the Miocene gas play, the Dunajec license also has a Cretaceous/Jurassic oil prospectivity. And you can see on the map here, not just red blobs corresponding to gas discoveries, but also green corresponding to historic oil discoveries. Now one very interesting thing, which I'll talk about in a second, is the Ring discovery, which is the Mniszow discovery. This is shallow oil discovery discovered in the '60s, which has not been carved out and remains on the block and Prospex has access to. And I'm actually just going to turn to that now to talk about it. What you can see here is historic map and log from the 1960s. And you can see a hand-drawn oil water contact shaded in light blue on the map on the picture here. Basically, wells were drilled in 1966 on this structure, discovered 13 meters of oil pay in a fractured carbonate, very shallow, 600 meters depth and very similar in character to the other oil discovery shown in the previous map, which is Grobla and Plawowice. The oil water contact, you can see mapped and shaded in light blue there. And the well corresponding to the circle on the map is the one you can see on the left. It very clearly shows oil saturation 13-meter interval. And based on cuttings and coatings, you can see it's fractured carbonate, which is a viable reservoir and was produced from both the offset fields from the '60s using 1960 zero technology and using vertical wells. Key thing for me that really stands out is cased hole test on this flowed 45 barrels a day. So I think what's very interesting to me is that within that license closure that's been offered to Prospex is we have historically undeveloped oil discovery of reasonable size that if this was in other areas of the world, would already be producing with [indiscernible] on it. And so a priority action for us is really to get after this and look at how this can be moved along, matured and understood better in short order because it could represent a very quick pathway to additional cash flow for the company. And should said on both of these, we have 100%. So it provides us lots of headroom within which to farm down to bring in partnership dollars, again, reinforcing that point is activity that's not necessarily equal dilution. So bringing things together, a bit of a summary and an outlook. One thing that I've heard from people who have reached out to me directly and ahead of this presentation, we actually had a couple of questions, which was specifically around cash reconciliation looking back over 2025. How much money did the company get taken, what did it spend on. So that's the purpose of this slide, to be very transparent for 2025 quarter-by-quarter and in total. And then also a provisional, given we're not quite at the end of the quarter yet, a provisional view for Q1 2026. The graph on the right-hand side of this slide is basically a waterfall chart showing climbing all the way to the top of the hill and coming all the way back down as a summary for the total of 2025, which is the deeper yellow column that you can see on the picture here and then quarter-by-quarter. I'm not going to go, in the interest of time, through every single line item here. Point here I would show -- or the 2 or 3 points I would really bring out to stress to people is that -- so based on revenue of around GBP 3 million to GBP 3.5 million a year, which is dominated by gas sales from our Italian asset, that covers direct OpEx on the Italian field, corporate overhead and around GBP 750,000 of investment activity per annum. So you can see that cash flow that Prospex has access to and controls can basically meet all its operating costs, meet its corporate overhead and requirements as a listed company and also leave a little left over for investment. During 2025, and I already touched on this when we talked about Tarba was that Tarba required financial support to maintain and retain the asset due to that transformer failure and the loss of revenue. And so I will point out to you in the table here, where it talks about investments, interest-bearing loans in Tarba, that was loans advanced to Tarba by Prospex during 2025 to effectively support the company and maintain Prospex position in the company and maintain the company in good order, effectively for the resource play that exists in Tarba, both for Romeral and Tesorillo and Ruedalabola. That represents a reasonable chunk of the company's resources. You can see here it sums to GBP 748,000 as a total for 2025. It's a material amount of cash. What I would also stress is this does not include -- as I alluded to earlier in the presentation, it does not include cash flows that are implied by production at Viura because those cash elements are retained within HEYCO Energy Iberia, and we don't have control over them, and we can't treat them as if that's controllable cash for the business, which is not reflected here on this chart. So moving on. A quick snapshot on reserves and resources. I guess the key thing for me is a headline here is net 2P reserves on the left and Selva Malvezzi and Viura are currently producing. But when you look at comparing that number to the net contingent resources and then also the best estimate prospective resources, the message I want you to take away from this is that the scale of growth relative to the base and relative to our current valuation is very significant indeed. And that's the key message that I took on when I started to get involved in Prospex is that from a low base, there's a great deal of upside to pursue. How are we going to do that? Asset by asset, clear asset activity. And that's what's summarized in this chart. So 2026, assets down the left-hand column, 2026, the current year, what's our focus, 2027, what comes next and then a recognition of how does that value actually is added to the asset, referring all the way back to that S curve we started with. So really focusing on 2026. We've already touched on this on Romeral. It's about delivering permits, introducing a JV partner, preparing for drilling. Viura finished the dynamic reservoir model, select drilling targets and the relevant design for that. Selva completed 3D seismic processing, prepared the CPR and that independent view of potential and value and prepare for well drilling. Now taking those 3, if you look at 2027, each of those then is drilling and associated time works, significant chunk of activity in '27. And I see that as an asset, and I'm going to come on to that in a second. Finally, in Poland, as we've just talked about, this is about consolidating data sources from history and gathering all that together, prepare for initial survey activity and really understand how we can potentially move forward on that undeveloped oil discovery. And basically, the value delivery at each step of the game here comes all the way back to the S curve. We're basically derisking the potential in the targets on each one of these licenses and moving towards development and production. So you can see a very clear value-adding pathway in each one of these assets. So the route to value, and I kind of alluded to it as I was just talking in that slide, I've called that convergence here. At the end of 2026, we're looking at 3 of our assets that will be converging towards decision points on very significant work programs around drilling on all 3 of Romeral, Selva and Viura. Each of those assets have a different path, chasing different targets and a different set of funding alternatives to actually meet the required CapEx. And as I've already undertaken, and I will continue to stress, my job, the company's job is to review and exhaust all available sources of capital to maximize the net value impact to shareholders. What does that mean? Quite deliberately said, explosive growth in 2027 and beyond. That convergence offers a significant potential reserve and production growth compared to a very low base and a very low entry valuation as Prospex is currently expressed. And within the European energy market and European natural gas market, particularly under current market conditions, that is a rare beast. So what that actually says to me is that, that convergence around the capital requirement for those drilling programs on those 3 assets, it's not a liability. It's actually an asset. It's actually something that will support us gaining traction on investment because it's rare, it's very valuable. And I suspect it's going to get more valuable as current geopolitical matters continue to grow arms and legs. So I'm going to finish on this, why invest in Prospex? New leadership and reset completed. I'm hoping that you've heard and seen a different approach than perhaps has happened before in terms of how we're looking at this as a series of discrete investments with a very rigorous view on how to add value with capital discipline and a non-dilutive value focus. Multiple assets moving towards decision points, decision points mean value, right? And I think I want everybody to recognize that. And I would finish by reinforcing that point again, a rare exposure to European gas security, and that's a commodity that's going to increase in value. So with that, I'm going to finish talking, and we're going to turn to the Q&A.

That's great, Tom. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind you recording of this present along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by investor dashboard. Tom, at this point, if I may hand back to you to chair the Q&A session, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Okie dokie. All right. Well, look, let's start off with a couple of questions here. I think some of these, I think we have just dealt with in the presentation, but I'll touch on them briefly. So one question here, do you see any of our assets being sold pre-drill campaigns? I think I've probably just answered that in the course of the presentation. At each natural breakpoint in an asset's life, we will stop and think and work out on what terms does it make sense for us to continue and fund going forward? Or do we think there's a better owner. So I guess the answer is going to be maybe, but it will be a value-driven objectively assessed decision at each point. What value per share do you think we should be? I think that sort of question, I always think about it is that price is what you're offered at any given day, value is what you think it should be. From my perspective, if you add up all the component parts that we've just talked about and gone through in the presentation, there's clearly a huge amount of potential that goes way beyond where the company is valued today. I think it's a huge amount of upside. And frankly, that was one of the motivating factors for me to join Prospex and get involved. I think what I would refer you to is there's quite a lot of high-quality broker research on the company and its assets that provide different analyses. And what we can do is we can make sure that links to that research is included in the Q&A responses for afterwards for anybody that's interested. There's a couple of questions that relate to AGM process in the summer. Bill, maybe if I could ask you to talk to those.

Sure. Thanks, Tom. A great presentation. So we have received a few questions about the Board of Directors and the AGM process. Under corporate law, Tom is required to stand for reelection at the next AGM, which will be coming up in the summer. In advance of every AGM at this company and most companies, the entire Board meets to review the capabilities and skill sets that we have on the Board and what we need to either add or change, if anything, keeping in mind the size of this company, which more or less dictates a fairly smallish Board, we currently have 3 nonexecutive directors and Tom is the Executive Director and CEO. So I can say that at this time, with Tom's recent appointment, he's been busy reviewing the assets and meeting the partners, and we have not yet had that review, but all 4 of us have discussed the need for having that in advance of this and plan to have a meeting within the next week or 2 to discuss the needs and capabilities in advance of preparing the proxy circular for the AGM. So more to come, although it's not clear at this point where there'll have to be any additions or changes, we haven't had that discussion yet.

All right. Thanks, Bill. A question here. Can you advise and clarify on the previous director's severance term? Just talking about my predecessor, Mark Routh, former CEO. So basically, to clarify there a couple of specific points raised in the question here. So Mark ceased to be CEO and a Director of Prospex on the 31st of January. He is currently serving out 3 months of contractual notice. So he remains available to the company and particularly to me until the end of April, so that 3 months. And that's effectively to help me on board and make sure that I can access his memory of recent and further back events because he has been involved in the company in one way or another for a number of years. In terms of anything in addition. There was no specific bonus or terminal bonus paid to Mark. In terms of options, he does have rights under option agreements for a period of time to exercise on certain options. I don't have the absolute specific details of that to hear, but we can get that and we can load it into the Q&A afterwards. So it's super specific. The next question relates to HEYCO. Is HEYCO likely to secure finance for drilling campaign? And does that also include an [indiscernible] element and a couple of other questions relating to cash and funding. So I mean it's a question fundamentally around how will we fund any obligations that may crystallize for our investment in Viura. Hopefully, based on what I said in the presentation, we have answered that, if not completely, certainly mostly. I can't speak for HEYCO, and I don't think you would expect me to. To the extent that HEYCO is able to find funding for the whole corporation, then I'd be very interested to look at it. Fundamentally, the commitment, I'm just going to repeat it, is that we will exhaust all forms of finance, whether that's debt, offtake finance, farm-in, farm-out and parallel investors in parallel with using our own capital resources. But a very critical focus is everything has to be value accretive at the per share level if we're going to spend our own money. Okay. Just scroll here excuse me, squinting at the screen. The -- there's a question here which I believe we've answered with the 2025 reconciliation, production cash flow covers and the actual cash flow numbers. So I believe we've answered that. And there's the final part of that question is why is it necessary to raise additional cash. I think if you look at the reconciliation, you can see that the company ended 2025 with a very low level of cash and there are clear lookahead to upcoming expenditures. So that's why it's necessary to raise that additional amount. And I think I alluded to that in my shareholder letter that I believe it was in shareholders' best interest to complete that process that had been started. Quarterly update, there was a question about here. I'm looking for a clear cash bridge. I believe we answered that completely in the presentation. If anything is not clear or if anybody has subsequent follow-up questions about that bridge and about those cash, happy to receive those and we can put it in the post presentation chat. There's a question here. The acceptance of formal offers for the Polish licenses, coupled with continued momentum in European gas markets via Dutch TTF seems to create no strong near-term catalysts. Does the Board view this as a window to hold off on further capital raises following the imminent license awards to bolster Prospex position for attractive non-dilutive JV or farm-out opportunities. So at the risk of sounding further, I'm going to be -- I couldn't have written it better myself. Absolutely, yes. So increasing TTF is a rising tide that lifts all of our boats, including these new licenses. And the award of those licenses and the opportunities they present really very interesting. We hold them at 100%. And like I said, and this is a broken record that I'll continue to say, we will investigate and exhaust all forms of funding before we turn to spending shareholders' funds, and we'll only do so if it is accretive on a per share basis. Okay. I think someone canceled out their own question after obviously flipping through the slides ahead of us. Okay. So there's a slight nuanced question here about funding. And it basically says we'll look at additional sources, it acknowledges we said we'll look at additional sources of capital. Noting that we have just closed GBP 2 million CLN, then can we category -- the question here is, can we categorically rule out issuing new equity, i.e., dilution in 2026 to cover corporate overheads or early-stage Polish exploration? So I think it's important to really hit this head on. Cash flow from production in Italy meets corporate overheads, and it meets the OpEx in Italy, and it leaves some surplus cash to meet certain investment objectives. I've said a few times now, and I'm just going to restate it, is that we will review all and any other forms of finance to meet investment objectives, whether that's parallel investment from a financial investor by bringing them alongside us into a project, by farming in a joint venture level an asset. I touched on that in the presentation about. Now I don't think anybody would expect me to categorically rule out the option of funding if I thought it was value adding for investors. So I'm just going to basically caveat the statement here and repeat what I've already said, which is if we believe that funding is accretive to investors on a per share basis, we will seek for ways to do it, and we'll exhaust all other possibilities before reverting to shareholders. Okay. There's a question about reserves and resources. Are these reserves and resources as at the end of 2025? So the reserves and resources included in there are a bit of a patchwork because they've been put together by the various CPRs that have been prepared in the past on each individual assets. So they are not as of end 2025 time and updated. And as you can hear, there's Selva Malvezzi, we're expecting a new CPR to be produced later this year, which will then update those numbers. So the answer is no, they're not as of end 2025. They are a combination of the various CPRs that you can access on the company's website. Okay. I am just looking down at questions here. Okay. So there's a general -- there's a couple of questions here about Viura and how it develops going forward. And a crux of each of these questions seems to revolve around when will we see net cash flow coming out of the asset. And my expectation would be net cash that's currently being generated within the company, is effectively ring-fenced and being held within the company and will be used to offset against any investment activity that the company then makes on subsequent well stock. At some point in time, you would expect the production revenue from that to break through, repay those costs and then be available for distribution to shareholders. Today, I can't give you a guidance on that because we still haven't worked. We still haven't got a clear view of what wells, when for what targets are going to be drilled. And that's the purpose of the dynamic model I've talked about today, and that will be the subject of the drilling and well design program that HEYCO Energy Iberia moves into once they've got access to that completed model through April. So that's not particularly satisfactory. It's just reality. I'm not able to give you firm guidance. But the trajectory is clear, which is understand the asset, target and drill more wells, produce more and ultimately turn it into a distributed asset. But I can't give you clear guidance on when and how much that will be. Okay. Given the presentation, do we require 2 brokers moving forward? So given my brokers will probably be watching this presentation, that's a provocative question. But look, what I would say about -- and not just for brokers, but about competencies, expertise and advisers, all the resources that the company needs, these are constantly under review. And that's not trying to be provocative in a similar way to what Bill talked about the Board. We, as a company, have a duty to you, shareholders, to make sure that we have got access to best available resources, capabilities, expertise to move our business forward. I've met with both our brokers. They both do similar but slightly different things. They've both been very active in the recent CLN raise and brought money to the table. They both have networks that do more than that in terms of corporate finance and potentially bring opportunities to the table. So I think I'm going to answer the question in a more general way, which is the resources that we have access to and the resources that we need at any given time, when they get out of kilter, we will make changes. But if we believe we need these resources, we'll maintain them. Can I check on time, Alex? When do we time out?

Yes, we've just reached the 1 hour mark, but it's up to you when you want to close the session. Obviously, we can address these questions post the meeting as well with written responses.

Okay. I think -- so I'm just looking at the questions here and a few have come in, in the last couple of minutes, and I think we're not going to be able to get through all of them. But let's try and do a couple more and then my commitment will be to make sure that we provide an answer to these so that they're kind of on the record. Okay. There's one here. Tom, will you be adding to your shareholding going forward on the open market? So look, I know there's a big -- with every company and management, they want to see skin in the game and shareholders want to see alignment. What I'm going to offer there is the terms of my appointment are very clear if you go back and look at the 6th of January RNS. And my incentivization was very clearly designed by -- in conversation with Bill and the rest of the Board to make it very clear to shareholders that fundamentally, I don't get paid unless shareholders make money. And you can see that from the structure that's been put together there. And you can see that a chunk of my headline salary is effectively being converted into shares on a monthly basis. And that's effectively by -- through an option scheme. But fundamentally, as far as I'm concerned, I'm buying shares every month through that mechanism. So I'm already doing that. I would not rule it out. And -- in terms of buying shares, -- but to be honest, probably not in the open market. I would prefer to signal to shareholders at the appropriate point that I am supportive of any other process that the company is raising money through. If that doesn't happen, then I would not rule out buying shares from the open market. But at this point, getting into the company, understanding all the nuts and bolts and everything else. But the one thing I'll say very clearly is look at my incentive package, look at what I'm incentivized to deliver. And to be really clear that if I don't deliver value for shareholders, I don't get -- none of that incentivized -- none of those incentives crystallize into value. So I'm very, very aligned with growing the value of the business.

Certainly, I can add being the primary individual who discussed this with Tom, that the intention from the Board's review was to give significant incentive based on share prices and the way the company is going to grow. I think that we should probably wrap it up, Tom. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you, everyone, for the questions and for taking the time to learn even more about the company. And Tom has committed at [indiscernible] that we're going to continue an enhanced shareholder communications program. And Tom, over to you for your final closing remarks.

Look, I think there's quite a few questions that have come in. We'll make sure we get answers to those put through the -- in written form on the website here. I guess the key things that I would say from my -- not quite 2 months in office, I visited our partners, our assets, teams on the ground. And I really just wanted to leave you with one message is that, that point about Prospex is a very rare beast in a very exciting energy market being the European gas market. And it punches above its weight in terms of growth potential relative to its current size and value. That's really clear to me. And what I love about it is there's a very clear step-by-step path to add value to each one of these assets. That's my job for the next year and beyond, but that's my focus for 2026, right?

Perfect. I may just jump back in there, and thank you very much indeed for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you.