Why did Nordic Trustee block my e-mails?

Rizgar Khoshnaw | Exclusive to iKurd.net

In the past four days, I have sent two e-mails to Nordic Trustee executives, the same personnel that I had written before and had responded, and both of my mails returned “undelivered”.

It is very clear to see that these two executives; Ms. Vivian Trosch and Mr. Martine L. Rasmussen have now blocked my e-mails from reaching them and do not want to answer any questions!

What are they hiding? Why do they not want to hear what I have to say about their operations and their involvement with issuing the $500 Million corporate bond for a company that is operating in Kurdistan? I am certain they know I was/am right about what I had predicted seven months ago and they do not want to hear it or admit they were wrong to issue such bond.

A little background on Nordic Trustee and what they do. On April 10, 2015, they took on the responsibility of underwriting of a $500 Million unsecured corporate bond for Genel Energy, an oil company operating in Kurdistan.

The bond maturity date is set at May 2019- not sure how the bond issuer will honor its commitments! I honestly believe that anyone that has invested in this bond will realize a huge loss in their investment and will be a big surprise to me if indeed they recoup their investment or even a portion of it.

Once I read the news about the bond, I decided to write Nordic Trustee to inquire about this very interesting transaction. I sent them an e-mail on April 13, 2015 and on the same day, I received a response from them with brief information about the bond. They were very polite and helpful in their initial response to my first e-mail.

But, once I wrote them few days later and asked how do they expect the investors to recover their money from a company that is struggling to even keep alive, they completely ignored my e-mails!

After reading about the $500M bond, I decided to research this issue deeper and try to come to a reasonable conclusion about where this issue will end up. After a week, on April 23rd, I decided to publish an article about this subject and warn the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) about this issue.

In my article ( KRG, Genel Energy, Tony Hayward and oil deals in Kurdistan) published on iKurd News site, I detailed my findings and gave my opinion on this bond.

Unfortunately, for the KRG and Genel Energy, the company stock is down 67%, this is a very dangerous drop for any stock, since I published my article in April 2015. When I published my article in April, the stock was trading at 638GBp and today, it is trading at only 211GBp.

I do not wish ill-thoughts to anyone, and I surly do not want to see any oil company in Kurdistan fail, I am merely presenting the facts as I see them and let the KRG know what to expect in the near future. I have been 100% on target on my assessments and predictions so far.

As I had warned many times in my previous writings for the past couple of years warning that the KRG will be facing many international lawsuits and need to be prepared for such day.

I am still hopeful that the KRG would take notes from my advice and suggestions and act on them for the sake of Kurdistan’s reputation and its survival. It would have disastrous affects/consequences if any oil company operating in Kurdistan indeed fails.

Rizgar Xoshnaw, a senior Kurdish writer based in Washington, a longtime contributing writer and columnist for iKurd.net.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.