Letters to the Editor

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Who is Windsor Energy Corp?

Not to be confused with American oil and gas company Windsor Energy Inc, Windsor Energy Corporation is a Canadian outfit in the same industry based out of Calgary, Alberta. It began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) on November 27, 1996.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the company, "...was primarily engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of oil and natural gas properties, as of September 30, 1998. The company had properties in the United States and Canada."

On November 6, 2009, registered securities of Windsor Energy Corp were revoked by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for repeatedly failing to file required quarterly and annual reports, violating federal securities law that requires public corporations to publicly disclose current, accurate financial information for investors to make informed decisions. The revocation was ordered after hearing by an administrative law judge. You can see the document here: http://cto-iov.csa-acvm.ca/ArticleFile.asp?Instance=101&ID=8CA6DA1DDBC3495B923C33E6C0146B7C

The Bloomberg publication also shows no listings for any personnel in the company, i.e. there is no listing for members of the board, executive committees or the management of the organization itself.

The address information for Windsor Energy Corp is listed as 444-5th Avenue, Suite 1120, Calgary, AB, T2P 2T8. The phone number is 403 233 0496, but when this publication attempted to call the company through that number, an interactive voice recorder said it was unavailable at the present time.

When this publication contacted Jennifer Pritchett, a Telegraph Journal reporter who has written recent articles on Windsor Energy, she stated she had a hard time getting her contact number for company CEO Khalid Amin, and didn't want to give the number out, lest, we understood, Amin disliked it and ceased being a source. The number she used wasn't the regularly posted one found in online searches for the company, but Amin's cell phone.

Traded under the stock symbol as WNS, the company has been de-listed from the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), as well as the Alberta Stock Exchange (ASE), and stopped voluntarily making company documentation public through www.sedar.com, an online research company for investors, with its last posting of a press release on April 15, 1999. It's assets are quoted on the site at that time as being a maximum of $100,000,000. It was listed as having no principal regulator.

The sedar site has no listing for personnel. It was only given an employee contact name by the company, that of Kuldip C. Baid. However, in other online documents, Baid's name is listed alongside board members.

Further research of Baid on Bloomberg Businessweek shows he is 63 years old and collected $129,632 CDN in executive compensation as of fiscal year 2011 for the position of CFO, Teras Resources Inc. The profile mentions Baid moved on to KIK Polymers Inc in April 29, 2011. He was the CFO of Windsor Energy from 1981 to 1986; dated information that is in keeping with the company's light internet signature.

At Halliburton Watch, a blog that keeps track of litigation by the company, Halliburton filed a civil action against Windsor Energy Corp during November 1998 for an undisclosed amount owed in Harris County District Court, Texas.

As a company with assets that once reached $100,000,000, the internet footprint of Windsor Energy Corp is a rather light one. It has no website, has no logo, isn't mentioned on Wikipedia and public documentation through Google goes cold with the above-mentioned 1999 press release. Nor is it a member of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the preferred lobby group of 90% of Canadian oil and gas industry companies.

It would seem Windsor Energy Corporation went from being a $100 million company at the turn of the century, to being a smaller operator in the past decade. Documentation doesn't seem to be available online explaining the company's decline. A request for further information has been lodged with the Natural Gas Group, the province's natural gas regulator.

UPDATE: The Natural Gas Group suggested we contact DNR for that information. We checked the DNR natural gas website, however, nothing is mentioned about Windsor Energy Corp., not even in the list of companies mentioned under the heading Current Exploration on the website.

We would love to contact DNR and request its Communications team provide us with any information it currently has on file about Windsor energy that can be released to the public. However since we are frozen out of their loop, we expect it would be a fools errand.

Given what we have found on our own with  simple online research, we wonder what the province had access to in order for it to make the decision to grant Windsor Energy a license to work in the province.