Fraud busters were investigating InterOil. Have they found anything? Well…

As we reported earlier, a certain Sam Antar a former fraudster and now a self-styled fraud buster, announced he would perform a “forensic accounting” exercise on April 18. It didn’t get off to a particularly promising start, as he asked the board for help.

That immediately struck us as odd, why would someone embark on such an exercise if he doesn’t appear to know anything about the company? You’d think he would start such “forensic accounting” because he had some indications something was amiss. If he indeed had such indications, he surely kept them private.

Now, we’re almost seven weeks later, and no result has been forthcoming apart from:

• An undercover interview with Wayne Andrews, at which a buddy of Sam, with a similar background, tried to entrap Wayne
• An article written by Sam Antar

Both were largely non-events as far as share price impact, which is not so surprising. They use two arguments:

1. InterOil has no reserves
2. Wayne broke the law in that interview

Both arguments don’t cut it, to say the least. We have rebutted the reserve issue extensively here, but even some comments to the Antar article, as anyone having a minimum of understanding about the oil and gas industry will, noted the hollowness of that argument.

No legal procedures have been brought forward to Wayne Andrews, who, in our view, handled himself quite exemplary in that interview, despite numerous efforts to tease him into saying something he shouldn’t. In fact the whole interview is a very eloquent state of the long case for InterOil.

Seven weeks later and no “forensic accounting” exercise has materialized. For people who went through the rather extraordinary length of hiring a private investigator posing as a rich investor, it looks like that is not because of lack of effort.

It looks like they haven’t found anything.

It doesn’t surprise us, but it should be good news to those who had doubts about InterOil. It has it’s tires kicked by people with bad intentions and some background in fraud, and they haven’t come up with anything…