Securities Lawyers Blog
The investment attorneys at Gana Weinstein LLP are investigating the potential unsuitable sales of securities sponsored by Ridgewood Energy Corporation (Ridgewood Energy). Ridgewood Energy is a private upstream oil and gas investment company based in Houston, Texas and Montvale, New Jersey and sponsors several oil and gas private placements and investments.
Ridgewood Energy issued a press release announcing that it had closed its latest private equity fund Ridgewood Energy Oil & Gas Fund III, L.P., its largest fund to date, with total capital commitments of more than $1.9 billion. The Fund is a continuation of Ridgewood Energy’s investment program focused on finding and developing oil in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Ridgewood Energy other offerings include Ridgewood Energy Bluewater Institutional Fund, LLC, Ridgewood Energy Bluewater Oil Fund II LLC, Ridgewood Energy Bluewater Oil Fund IV, LLC, Ridgewood Energy Oil & Gas Fund II, L.P., Ridgewood Private Equity Partners Energy Access Fund LLC.
Investors often do not understand the substantial risks of oil and gas private placements. As recently reported in Reuters, when offerings by Atlas Energy LP, another issuer of oil and gas private placements were analyzed, investors only get to see 65-70% of their capital actually put to work on oil and gas projects. Further, the returns on these projects had more in common with running profitable casinos than investments. Reuters found that slightly more than half of 43 private placements Atlas issued over the past three decades investors lost money or just broke even. While investors lost in more than half of the deals in 29 or 67% of those deals, Atlas actually out-performed their own investors.