It’s a weak pun that has been used many times but today, to misquote Frankie Valli, Greece is the word.
In stock markets across Europe investors are heading for the exit faster than greased whippets, while Asian markets this morning all took a battering.
Greece’s banks are shut today in order to prevent savers from withdrawing their funds, but pundits suggest that a run on the banks seems inevitable after Alexis Tsipras, prime minister of the country that gave the world democracy, elected to put the European Union’s latest bailout proposals to a referendum.
The decision came as a shock to the union’s negotiators, who have been steadily tightening the ratchet on Greece in the run-up to tomorrow’s deadline for a repayment of the country’s loan from the International Monetary Fund.
The referendum is scheduled to take place on Sunday and you do not need to be Pythagoras to realise that the numbers here do not add up.
Not surprisingly, the top three terms “trending” on the business news section of a well-known search engine run by an organisation that pays less tax than Greece are: Alexis Tsipras, Euro, European Union.
The fourth and fifth most popular subjects are Gatwick airport and Barclaycard, so the advice is if you are flying to Greece from Gatwick, use your credit card to get plenty of cash before leaving.
On further inspection, it appears that the reason Gatwick is being so heavily used as a search term is because the airport suffered a power cut last night.
The oil companies looking to develop the Horse Hill project down the road from Gatwick in the Weald Basin have not been blamed for the outage, but there has been plenty of coverage about UK onshore energy developments, with the papers over the weekend arguing the toss over the decision by Lancashire officials last week to reject Cuadrilla Resources’ application for permission to perform shale gas fracking at a site near Preston.
Meanwhile, Egdon Resources (LON:EDR) has farmed out a 20% working interest in PEDL143 to UK Oil & Gas (LON:UKOG), with the latter agreeing to pay a 40% share of the Holmwood-1 drilling costs.
In other energy news, things are looking up for Gulf Keystone (LON:GKP), which has received payments totalling US$9.8mln recently for domestic deliveries.
This comprised US$4.9mln for past oil deliveries and US$4.9mln as a pre-payment for contracted deliveries in the future. GKP said it had US$68.7mln of cash as of June 26.
Shares have risen by 24% today, adding to yesterday’s handsome gains, so it appears we now live in a world where it is safer to put your money in Kurdistan than Greece.
In other sector news, results from Petroceltic (LON:PCI) were somewhat overshadowed by news that it is mulling a bond issue, though boutique broker SP Angel says the news is not a surprise, “nor is it an issue, provided that the principal amount is no more than they can pay under their stress tests”.
It has been an up and down month for Armadale Capital (LON:ACP), the investment company focused on natural resource projects in Africa; it started on a high, with the provisional agreement by the Africa Mining Contracting Services group to provide at least US$20mln of loan financing to get the Mpokoto gold project up and running, and the month is ending on another high, with Mine Restoration Investments raising funds by placing shares at ZAR0.07 a share - a price that values Armadale’s stake at around £910,000.
Armadale’s shares have risen by almost a third, taking the market value of the company to £2.78mln.
Lastly, Quindell (LON:QPP) surprised practically nobody by saying that its results for 2014 will not be published by the end of this month. Last week the company asked for trading in its shares to be suspended as it wrestled with the complexities of its accounts, following a change of policy in terms of recognising revenue and deferring case acquisition costs.
The shares will remain suspended until the accounts are published.