Short of working capital, Arete sold five small Kansas and Wyoming working interests for $300,000 to a truck-wash company half owned by its own chief executive, with the remaining directors negotiating the price. Its bank line was cut to $523,000 and extended to 2020 - and this turned out to be the last report Arete ever filed.
Hein quit after a single year, having warned of substantial doubt about Arete's ability to keep operating and of material weaknesses in its controls; Haynie & Company took over. Three audit firms in eighteen months, with a going-concern warning attached to the last one.
Causey Demgen & Moore declined to stand again - the second time the same firm had walked away from Arete, after 2004 - reporting no disagreements over the accounts.
23 Feb 2016asset acquisition disposition● NeutralMajor
The Wellstar purchase closed on 30 December, paid for with $1.7 million raised from a new 7% preferred issue. On the same day Arete settled with the Tucker, DNR and Tindall group for $303,329 in cash plus preferred shares, closing out what was left of the 2011 deal and ending five years of entanglement with director Charles Davis's companies.
Arete agreed to buy producing oil leases in Sumner County, Kansas and Kimball County, Nebraska from Wellstar for $1.1 million cash plus a million shares - its first acquisition since 2011 and, unusually, from a seller with no connection to its own directors.
Arete took roughly 1.45% and 0.33% interests in two more Wyoming horizontal wells, and confirmed the three wells it joined in November 2013 had been drilled, completed and were producing.
Arete bought back 1.2 million of its own shares - 8.9% of the register - from Burlingame at $0.19, with Scheidt, Prosser and Stewart taking a further 260,000 from the same seller. Insiders had converted debt at $8.00 a share three years earlier; the price now tells the real story.
Arete got its first bank money: a $1.5 million CityWide Bank line secured on seven wells, a third party's $500,000 deposit and the personal guarantee of chief executive Nicholas Scheidt. It also turned the scattered director advances into formal notes and pushed back what it owed Burlingame.