Personally if I was a Board member -

If I didn't have a leg to stand on, I would have given Hess the extension as part of something is better than nothing. Also as a board member I would know that my shares of stock will immediately increase with the announcement.

However, if I had a couple of conversations on the backend that indicated there was more interest from other players and that my OWN analysis indicated that we have strong seismic data -- I would tell them to take a hike. I already got the seismic data for FREE, so now I can negotiate better terms with another player with strong seismic data. So now my shares will go even higher when we negotiate a better deal.

So, since I had to sell some shares last year to further my children's education, I took this time to buy another 15,000 shares as I feel the meeting tomorrow (someone else said there is a shareholders meeting ) in Australia may reveal a little bit more on the subject.