Meren Energy Inc.

Hello everyone, my name is Sandra and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Africa Oil Third Quarter 2023 results call and webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star 1 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please note that any time participants in the webcast can submit their questions using the Q&A box on the webcast interface. Please note that this event is being recorded. The recording will be available for playback on the company's website. I would now like to pass the meeting to Mr. Shahan Amini, Africa's Oil Investor Relations and Commercial Manager. Please go ahead, Mr. Amini.

Thank you, Sandra. On behalf of management, I thank you for joining us today for first quarter 2023 results call. We are grateful for your interest and support. On the call today, we have President and CEO, Dr. Roger Tucker, and our CFO, Mr. Pascal Nikoda. Roger will kick-start with a brief introduction before we present the quarter's highlights, and Roger will then cover Africa oil's investment case and outlook before we go into a Q&A session. But first, I would like to remind everyone that remarks made during this session are subject to forward-looking statements, which involve significant risk factors and assumptions and have been fully described in the company's continuous disclosure reports. The information discussed is made as of today's date and time, and Africa Oil assumes no obligation to update These are less as required by law. The company's complete financial statements and related MD&A are available on the company's website and on CDOT. On that note, Roger, we're ready for you. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Shaheen. So first of all, it is a pleasure to be presenting my first results and participating in this webcast. First of all, a little bit about myself. You have read my resume, if you like, on the new website, but I'm originally a geologist with a PhD. I went into Exxon for many years and travelled all around the world doing all aspects of geology and geophysics. I then joined a British independent that grew very, very significantly across the world called LASMO. I then had a very interesting adventure working for Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Yugos in Russia. I then did some private equity investing work. And ultimately, fairly recently, I ended up as a senior vice president in the BG group, working on stuff in the Americas and also in Europe. And then I've done a series of other private equity-based deals. I'm also a non-executive director of PetroTal, who are based in production interests in Peru. So I've pretty much worked every basin all across the world in big companies, in small companies, in NOCs, in independents, and private equity investments. So I've been here just four months now, and it has been an incredibly busy four months since I took over. We've performed a very deep review of the business that I inherited. We've been managing some very significant stakeholder relationships. We've presented a business plan to the board, and we've reorganized the organization, including bringing in some very key new recruits. including a senior vice president of business development and a in-house general counsel who will be starting in the next week or so. So as the slide says, what attracted me to this company to come into here is that it had absolutely outstanding existing assets in the portfolio. It needed to have a little bit of a reorganization, but the assets underlying the business of the highest quality. In addition, then, we have an extremely strong balance sheet, which Pascal will talk about a little bit later on. Our production, which we will describe later on, is at the highest quality with the highest netbacks. And in addition, within the portfolio, we've got some low-risk, high internal rate of return development opportunities in Nigeria. But then I suppose the crown on the head of this is our interest in the Orange Basin, which are truly world-class investment opportunities. And I'll be talking in more detail about those a little later on in the presentation. So next slide, Shane. And so what have we achieved actually this quarter? I think that we've got extremely strong operational results. The Venus 1X test result was positive, as we have described. And as you can see on the bullets on the right-hand side, the operator has indicated that this would be a field that will be developed in the future. In terms of production, we've seen an increase in our average production for the first time since Q2 2021, and Pascal will talk a little bit more about that. We've converted OML127 into the new petroleum terms in Nigeria. We received a very significant dividend from prime of 62.5 million, and we're exiting this quarter with a cash balance of $201.5 million, which completely underpins our corporate balance sheet. And so passing now over to Pascal to deal with those financial issues and production issues.