EU suggests Argentina’s import restrictions could delay Mercosur trade talks

Friday, July 2nd 2010 - 03:07 UTC

Full article 4 comments

Negotiations for a trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, re-launched this week in Buenos Aires, could not have a second chapter if the Argentine government insists in restrictions to food imports, said the head of the EU delegation. Read full article

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Billy Hayes
Another of your stated investment criteria is to focus on companies with new discoveries in the hope that eventual resources will be larger than first announced. In the light of this what is your take on the situation in the Falklands considering the considerable recent drilling success by Rockhopper Exploration (LON:RKH)?

We avoided the Falklands companies for all these years because we considered them to be a very high exploration risk area. They had not drilled enough, there was only scant geological testing – they have done a lot of seismic mapping and processing that indicated there may be significant accumulations of hydrocarbons there – but it is a vast area and it is very easy to drill in the wrong place. Rockhopper seems to have drilled in the right place and the result of that is a several times re-valuation of its equity, but at this stage we think it is over-valued. We think that the results that it has produced from this one well are not enough to justify the size of the reserves and we think that the market is far too excited and assigns a too-high valuation to Rockhopper. It will take another three or four wells to give us much better confidence of what is down there and whether it is commercially viable. On top of that, there are many other potential problems even if the oil is commercially viable, again relating to political risk. We go back to the conflict with Argentina, which recently refused to allow vessels supplying the Falklands to berth in their ports, so there is going to be ongoing instability and uncertainty as to how these companies will be able to exploit this oil, whatever oil they find. In addition, it is very far away from any commercial deposit of oil, so they will need to build massive infrastructure to exploit any oil they find.
Jul 02nd, 2010 - 03:20 am - Link - Report abuse 0
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Hoytred
And the relevance to this article is ...... ?
Jul 02nd, 2010 - 06:52 am - Link - Report abuse 0
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harrier61
Doesn't matter about Billy. Read his comment carefully. It has been cut and pasted from elsewhere. Whatever its meaning is, it's quite intelligent. Unlike Billy.
Jul 02nd, 2010 - 05:26 pm - Link - Report abuse 0
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Hoytred
“massive infrastructure” - sounds like a building boom and that'll mean even more 'islanders' .... someone's not going to be happy with that prospect :-)
Jul 03rd, 2010 - 01:17 am - Link - Report abuse 0
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