Hi sharky;

From it's latest presentation, the value of Petrolifera on paper appears to be around $178 million dollars if you include it's current debt, give or take a few million dollars. With a current share price of 0.65 cents Canadian. If a buyer gave Petrolifera a 30% premium on this share price Connacher and Petrolifera shareholders would get say 0.20 cents extra (0.65 + 0.20 = 0.85 cents a share). This is if a deal were completed today to buy the entire company. However, deals normally take longer than that. If a deal were to take place after November, when I fully expect the share prices of Canadian oil and gas companies to rise, then shareholders could get a bit more than this. Also, if you look at the yearly profits that companies like Imperial Oil and BP etc. make, $10 or $12 billion dollars a year, then paying a little more than $178 million to buy Petrolifera, with all of it's fabulous lands with huge reserve potential in Columbia and Peru is a drop in the bucket. Talisman may have some interest in buying Petrolifera, as it has exploration and production land in both Peru and Columbia. If the Chinese national oil company was interested.....

Petrolifera has been underfunded from its inception. The reason Connacher spun off Petrolifera into a separate company originally, was because Connacher could not afford the capital to drill on it's Argentinain land holdings. When Petrolifera was spun off, it had to raise it's own capital. It never had enough capital to explore on the lands that it acquired. It was dealt a severe blow when it did an equities sale 2 or 3 years ago, and Petrolifera's banker, the National Bank of Canada, I believe, talked management into putting the money that it had just raised from the equity sale into that ABCP paper which the recession rendered almost worthless at the time. Petrolifera basically never recovered from this. Which gets Petrolifera to where it is today, with it's strategic review.

Cheers; Scott