By Renée Bonorchis

Pretoria, SA, January 24, 2006 (Business Report)The ability to play one's cards close to one's chest is a key advantage of managing an unlisted company. And so it is with Tokyo Sexwale, the chairman of unlisted Mvelaphanda Holdings, which has a controlling stake in Ophir, an Africa-focused oil and gas explorer that has quietly gone about building a tantalizing portfolio of concessions in Africa.

By last year, Mvela's investment in Ophir was reliably understood to exceed R1 billion. This was even before it ploughed funds into the company as part of a recent private capital-raising exercise in the UK that garnered more than R500 million.

Mvela won't say how much it invested in the latest round. Mvela says it is Ophir's largest and controlling shareholder, but it will not disclose more. Gossip all the way from Somaliland suggests Mvela's stake is around 45 percent.

This emerged after disgruntled individuals made noises in a letter last year about an offshore exploration license held in Somaliland by Rover Energy, which is 75 percent owned by Ophir.

According to a report in the Indian Ocean Newsletter, Rover management in turn wrote a letter to the Somaliland president in December, apparently reproaching officials for leaking information to the company's detractors.

Management cited the 45 percent ownership figure in the letter. Alan Stein, the managing director of Ophir, describes the Somaliland dispute as "a storm in a teacup" and reiterates that the license is not in jeopardy.

"The guys who wrote the letter had been trying to get jobs ... Then they wanted data from us. Then they wanted to sell it to us. The stuff they wrote was nonsense," Stein says, clearly irritated at being questioned on the matter.

"We had meetings with the minister and the vice-president in Somaliland a few weeks ago. Everything was fine. The minister was aware of the letter, and their view was pretty much the same as ours," he says.

Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991, is not yet recognized by the international community and Stein, who is more comfortable with this line of questioning, says Ophir faces "some issues" in relation to the sovereignty position. For example, some contractors need to resolve questions about insurance.

Ophir has identified some locations in the massive 28 564km2 Berbera Block in Somaliland for further work. However, it wants to acquire more data for confirmation.

While the Somaliland concession is not on Ophir's immediate radar (Gabon and Equatorial Guinea fit that bill), its prospects are lucrative enough to play a waiting game; the geology is a continuation of the same basins in Yemen.