Steered by sector veteran Algy Cluff, North-Sea focused cash shell Cluff Natural Resources (CNR) has joined AIM.

The company, which has raised £3.75 million, is led by Cluff, a man well known within the mining and oil & gas industry who led his African mining outfit Cluff Gold to the junior market in 2004.

Joining Cluff on the board is a team that includes non-executive director The Earl De La Warr, the current vice chairman of Shore Capital’s vice chairman of its Europe, the Middle East and Africa business. Also on the team is chairman Nicholas Berry, a non-executive director at The Daily Mail and General Trust.

CNR’s chairman and CEO Cluff, says, ‘We have taken the decision to launch CNR as we believe there are significant opportunities to generate substantial value for shareholders through investing in and acquiring prospective oil & gas and mining assets globally.’

In an interview with sister title Growth Company Investor, Cluff said that while at Cluff Gold, where he resigned from his role as chairman earlier this year, he had been ‘frustrated at being locked into the gold business and seeing opportunities that I was unable to take part in’.

He argued that many AIM-quoted oil & gas and mining companies had ‘failed to deliver’, something he attributed to a combination of ‘incompetence and promising too much’, adding that the recent boom had seen those with no previous experience in commodities attempt to join the business.

Regarding key regions for Cluff Natural Resources he argued that West Africa is an area with governments that ‘both want and need foreign investment’ adding that while there is some volatility, the governments themselves ‘Are not anti-foreign investment’.