Israel's Navitas Petroleum plans to raise $130 million in bonds and then carry out an initial public offering (IPO) on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange as it expands operations in the Gulf of Mexico and Canada. The exploration and production company will use the money raised in the bond offering to fund development and secure a 5 percent stake in the deep-water project Buckskin in the Gulf of Mexico, which holds an estimated 490 million barrels of recoverable oil, Navitas Chairman Gideon Tadmor said on Tuesday.
Upon completion of the bond issuance - which is aimed at institutional investors and has been graded "A-" by Standard & Poor's Israeli unit Maalot - Navitas will go public in Tel Aviv, Tadmor said.
Navitas' valuation in the IPO will be approximately $100 million, according to a prospectus. "After two and a half years of downturn in the upstream sector, there are very interesting investment opportunities in the sector in the U.S," Tadmor told Reuters. Tadmor, 53, has been a public face for Israel's energy industry over the past decade as the country emerged as a regional player.
He bought Navitas from Israeli conglomerate Delek Group, where he had previously held senior roles, which discovered the massive natural gas fields Tamar and Leviathan. These discoveries turned Israel into an energy exporter. Drill bits from both wells are displayed in his new offices. Despite the local boom, Navitas, with stakes in 11 oil and gas projects in the Gulf of Mexico and another in Newfoundland, Canada, will be one of the first public Israeli companies to operate abroad.
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