Petroceltic suffers losses of €13.8m

The drilling of unsuccessful wells in Egypt, Bulgaria and Romania resulted in Irish oil exploration company Petroceltic reporting a $19m (€13.8m) loss for last year.

Following the company’s interim report, Petroceltic announced it was placing $100m of shares with institutional investors to help fund further exploration and development in Algeria, Kurdistan and Egypt.

The placing is made up of 37.9m shares at a price of 157p per share. Petroceltic gained a new shareholder, Dovenby, owned by Malaysian oil and gas specialist Dato’ Ahmad Fuad, which will take up half of the new shares issued.