Dragon Oil Shareholders Register

The campaign is now live!

We are now contacting as many shareholders as possible and we need your help! See the end of this entry for more details.

Today (Tuesday 17th of November) my copy of the Dragon Oil Shareholders register has finally arrived. In a box. Just over 3000 pages of printed text just slightly too big to scan in a normal scanner. After just over two weeks of sandbagging and delays this is what Capita Registrars finally sent me.

Dragon Oil Shareholders Register

I think there is a lot that could be done to improve this process.. I understand they don’t want to make it too easy for direct junk mail marketeers however in situations such as the one we’re in with Dragon Oil there needs to be a better way for shareholders to communicate with one another. I would suggest some kind of electronic messaging system (preferably not email) maybe something a bit more like the RNS system where shareholders could send messages which would be automatically picked up by all the share websites and maybe also displayed on the websites of corporate registrars like capita.

Dragon Oil Shareholders Register

I begged Capita Registrars to give me an electronic copy of the register.. I argued with at least 4 or 5 people over the phone – none of whom could think of any reason why they shouldn’t give me an electronic copy but were also adamant that they would not. Eventually I was put through to man who gave his name as Patrick Brown who gave me this spurious excuse – “It’s because with an electronic copy we don’t know we’re giving it to *you*”. When I pointed out he could quite easily stick a CD in the box along with the 3000 pieces of paper he became flustered and basically told me to piss off.

I don’t think the current system would really prevent any direct marketeers from harvesting this data – indeed my costs so far have been relatively modest – it should still be <£500.00 once the scanning is finished. The paper register delivery method presents much more of an impediment to shareholder communication than it would to junk mailers. I do wonder to what extent there is influence from Dragon Oil management (or even just corporate managements in general) on Capita Registrars (who are a supplier to Dragon in maintaining Dragon's shareholder register) to make life difficult for activists. Capita Registrars said that they were going to tell Dragon Oil that I had requested a copy of the register. While I have no proof of this It doesn't seem at all unlikely to me that when informed of this Dragon Oil asked them to stall as long as possible.

Anyway.. after so many delays, I'm not sure if there will be any time left to make use of the register (Dragon is going to send out it's own communication any day now and then people will start voting) and indeed many people are now visiting this site so it may not be that important any more either.

I am going to proceed with having the register scanned anyway. Once this is done, if anyone wants to help sending out mailings I propose something like this..

If we can get around 200 people to help (there are about 1000 active visitors to this site at the moment). I will assign each of the volunteers 15 pages of the register for them to attempt to contact as many people as they can starting with those with the greatest number of shares.

If you are interested in helping out with this please create an account on this site and I will contact you once everything is ready.

One final note about the whole paper register thing and how ridiculous it is; It occurs to me that I have not signed any agreement regarding what I should use the register for. If I wanted too I don't believe there is anything to stop me from selling this list to a direct marketeer once I'm finished with it to recoup my costs (I won't though I promise!).

Other things to do - please keep mentioning this site when you post comments on other news sites and on share forums! It really is helping to drive traffic here as well as increasing the site's profile on google.

Campaign is now live! We need your help to contact shareholders.

Get the word out now

If you are registered on this site and want to mail or call other Dragon Oil plc shareholders to alert them to our situation; you can request a page of people to contact by going here:
http://www.savedragon.com/requestpage.php.

For those wanting to telephone people on the register Ross Evans will be running a phone number search service. To use this simply send him the address or addresses (max of 5 per request) you want the telephone numbers for to savedragon@googlemail.com and he will reply with the numbers for the addresses if available. UK addresses only

You can also look them up in the phonebook or register an account on http://www.192.com and use that.