Smaller companies spotlight

EACH week, former Fleet Street City Editor Patrick Lay keeps This Is Money readers up-to-date with a neglected, but exciting sector of the stock market - smaller companies.

Pryor knowledge

ONE has to admire Bernard Pryor, or 'Bernie' Pryor as the chief operating officer of Adastra Minerals prefers to be known, who has taken the recent attempted coup in the

Democratic Republic of Congo in his stride, despite the fact that Adastra has just made a $5m (£2.8m) investment in the area.

'We never like having news like that,' he confessed, 'but it was not much of a coup – more a disruption - nobody was injured, nobody was killed. Things were a lot worse six years ago when we first went there,' he says.

So keen is he to promote the message that the DRC is a comfortable home for investors that he is planning to invite fund managers and analysts to join him on a visit in the autumn ahead of further fundraising.

Adastra has spent much of the past six years trying to get its hands on the Kolwezi Tailings Deposits - 112.8m tonnes of the residue of earlier mining operations - from which the company expects to extract 42,000 tonnes of copper and 7,000 tonnes of cobalt a year for the next 38 years by the simple process of applying high pressure water hoses to wash away the surplus.

It has now signed an agreement with the DRC Government that gives it 82.5% of the operation, with the remaining 17.5% owned by the Government and the state-owned mining company.

Although Mr Pryor has no doubts about the resources – they sit on the top of the land like a giant slurry tip – a definitive feasibility study starts next month, and talks have already started with potential buyers for the cobalt.

Once all the facts are in place and a decision to go ahead is finalised, a further payment of $10m will be made.

Barring an outbreak of all out war, it seems that decision will be made. As Mr Pryor concludes: “It is our firm conviction that those seeking to aid a strong, free DRC cannot sit idly and await ideal conditions, but must engage the DRC and help foster those very conditions which will enable economic and political freedoms to take root and flourish. Adastra has always believed that political progress cannot precede economic progress, but rather that they must advance together.”

If only Adastra was operating in the UK he probably would have got a knighthood for such sentiments.

CHIP

This week I took delivery of my second chip-and-pin credit card; already I am having trouble remembering which pin number goes with which card, and even mixing up the series of numbers.

I raise the point because ID Data, the smart-card systems company tells me it has won an exclusive contract to design, develop and personalise Citibank chip-and-pin cards for the UK market, it has also begun production for GE Capital, the UK‘s biggest store-card supplier and has extended its contract with Electronic Data Systems to supply chip cards for the Post Office Card Account.

In a separate announcement it reveals it is taking over CardBASE Technologies, a Dublin-based provider of software for smart cards to banking, retail and security groups.

Such measures are designed to reduce the risk of fraud. An alternative idea, I could suggest, is one that was operating at petrol stations in Southern Italy which I visited this past week – no credit cards, just put your euros into a machine and the pump will deliver the amount of petrol you have paid for, but only after you have paid.

ACQUISITOR

I apologise for returning to the subject of the two Acquisitor companies again this week but in all the confusion of Acquisitor plc and Acquisitor Holdings (Bermuda) Ltd, I made the error of referring to Acquisitor plc (the UK-based company) as privately-owned when, of course, it is AIM-quoted and has all of 100 shareholders.

Meanwhile, the Bermudan company has raised its stake in Baltimore Technologies to 24.11% by the purchase of 350,000 shares, and in Nettec to 25.1% by the purchase of one million shares.

NEW ISSUE ALERT

A flood of new issue alerts has hit the market in the past week with ambitions to raise more than £350m in total.

Such has been the pace that I cannot guarantee all are covered here, but of those that have landed on my desk I offer the following, all of which are going for a quotation on the Alternative Investment Market.

· The PFI Infrastructure Company that, I learn, is planning to offer 70m shares to institutional investors at 140p a share, the cash to be invested in new private finance initiative projects.

· Nelson Resources is also looking to raise around £100m to develop its Kazakhstan oil production.

· Hotel Corporation, an investor in hotel businesses, wants £40m.

· Vectura, an emerging pharmaceutical development company, seeks to raise £20m-£25m through an institutional placing.

· Blueheath, a retailer, wants to raise £15m.

· Biofuels is another looking for £15m.

· Adventis, a specialist multi-media marketing and advertising agency has raised £3.6m.

· Cubus Lux, a Croatian gaming group, is raising £1.3m through an offer for subscription at 22.5p a share, to open new seasonal casinos.

In addition, Eurocastle, an investment firm, is looking to raise £50m for a main market float and BioProgress, already on AIM is applying for its shares to be quoted on NASDAQ.