LONDON, October 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --
Africa New Energies (ANE), the innovative UK-Namibian high-tech but low cost oil and energy exploration company, has attracted the support of some of Namibia's most popular music stars to help attract thousands of potential new investors and break the world crowd funding record.
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Announcing the ambitious new crowd-funding strategy at ANE's annual general meeting in London on October 8, CEO Stephen Larkin also revealed plans to reach African, UK and other international and other potential investors through a network of Africa-based call centres staffed by disabled people.
ANE's plan to provide socially useful and dignified employment to hundreds of disabled Africans helped to attract celebrity support from some of Africa's hottest young stars headed by Namibian musician, Gazza. Gazza, whose real name is Lazarus Shiimi, held shareholders spellbound as he recalled his youth in rural northern Namibia, running 5 kms to school and back and tending to cattle and goats before seizing what remained of daylight to do his schoolwork and study without electricity, like millions throughout Africa.
Gazza, who named himself after the former UK footballer, announced that ANE would produce a reality TV show showcasing ANE's work in a 13 part mini-series on prime time television. In addition, he has planned three concerts, two in the UK and one on the concession itself.
The dynamic young stars are throwing their energy behind efforts to focus media attention and wider publicity on ANE's fundraising effort in order to help finance oil and gas exploration in the Nama basin of eastern Namibia. ANE's ultimate goal is to use gas to generate affordable electricity for all Namibians if oil and gas are proven by exploratory wells next year
CEO Stephen Larkin also told the AGM that the company had just launched a new campaign on crowd funding platform Angels Den. This will promote the fundraising campaign and illustrate the investment opportunity to its 12,000 members in a countrywide road show.
Initially supported by a grant from the UN-Affiliated African Innovation Foundation to do a pre-feasibility study on solar energy for Namibia, one of the world's sunniest countries, ANE found that solar was prohibitively expensive for the vast but thinly populated country. It advised the government to search for gas to fuel a power station instead.
This led to the award of a 22,000 sq km exploration concession, larger than Wales, by the Namibian government whose Namcor energy corporation is a shareholder. In this vast, semi-desert area ANE has developed a highly innovative, proprietary surface-based exploration methodology.
This models 17 layers of remote sensing, airborne and soil-based datasets, back- tested against data from 6000 known oil and gas fields around the world. To date, the first nine data layers have been collected and analysed with highly promising results.
ANE recently scored a significant victory for its low cost, low risk strategy when it became the first oil and gas company to be awarded Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) status by the UK government. This means that UK individual tax-paying investors get the majority of their risk underwritten by the UK taxman. Through its EIS investors alone ANE has raised over £2 million. This has been raised to almost £4 million by research and development tax credits, grants and strategic consulting contracts in tax, IT consulting and oil and gas infrastructure.
For more information, please contact info@ane.na
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