Cairn Energy said yesterday that chief executive Sir Bill Gammell had sold just over 720,000 shares in the company for nearly £3million.
He still has 3,210,738 shares in Scotland’s largest oil company plus an outstanding award of 223,600 shares in subsidiary Cairn India under a long-term incentive plan.
Sir Bill sold his shares on Tuesday, the day Cairn saw its share price close up 8% at 408.9p after it upgraded its estimates of reserves in the north-west Indian province of Rajasthan.
Announcing annual results for 2009, Edinburgh-based Cairn also issued an upbeat statement on its prospects offshore Greenland, where it is planning a four-well exploration campaign starting this year.
Sir Bill did not sell at the top of the market as Cairn shares peaked at 425.1p on Tuesday, but still sold at a significantly higher price than the day before. The group’s shares closed at 411.8p yesterday.
The company said on Tuesday it believed the potential resources in its Rajasthan area was now 6.5billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe).
It said it had increased its discovered in place resource from 3.7billion to 4billion boe, and there was a further estimated resource of 2.5billion boe.
Cairn added that it already had approval to produce 175,000 barrels per day (bpd) from its Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya fields and it was now working to demonstrate the resource base could support output of 240,000bpd.
The company also said it was its belief that Greenland, as part of the north Atlantic geological province, had hydrocarbons in its offshore basins although it would take luck to find them.
Only six exploration wells have been drilled off Greenland to date, five in the 1970s and one in 2000, all to the west of Greenland and south of the undrilled Baffin Bay region.
That is where Cairn plans to start its exploration campaign this summer, and while surveys have been positive the company said there may only be around a 10% chance of success with the four prospects.
Costs of drilling off Greenland will be high at up to £250million per well, but rewards could also be high. Cairn says it has 30 prospects and leads of up to 1billion barrels each in the seas around Greenland.
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