No gushes of joy at Tullow

It is a worrying time for the 140 Irish-based staff of Tullow Oil, which announced a $500 million cost-cutting programme this week that is likely to impact heavily on its offices here.

It is also worth noting that, regardless of their greater capacity to absorb a financial hit, some of those at the top of the company have also lost out extremely heavily in its share price collapse.

On the Dublin stock market Tullow’s share price breached €18 in its glory days during the summer of 2012. Aidan Heavey, the company’s driving force and chief executive, owned about 7.6 million shares which were worth at the time about €135 million.

Tullow’s share price in Dublin this week got down as low as the €5 mark after it announced losses of $2 billion. Assuming Heavey has held on to his shares his stake is now worth only about €38 million. That’s almost a cool €100 million wiped off Heavey’s paper wealth in a little over two years.

Painful, although he’ll surely be able to keep the wolf from the door.

Angus McCoss, the group’s exploration director, owned 760,000 shares worth close to €14 million back in 2012. As of Wednesday evening his stake had since reduced to 260,000 shares, worth in the region of €1.3 million.

McCoss, according to a market announcement late on Wednesday evening, sold about 12,000 shares to cover a tax bill on the exercise of options. The remaining 13,000 of the 25,000 awarded under the option, the note said, “will be pledged to UBS Private Banking as security for certain personal loans”.