Aurelian: on both sides of the table, and a board cleared in a single day

The overlap

Two entries in the United Kingdom’s statutory register, read together, describe a position that is worth stating plainly.

From 19 December 2007, a director named Narenderkumar Dharamveer Manoj Madnani sat on the board of Kulczyk Investments S.A., the Luxembourg investment house of Jan Kulczyk, then the richest man in Poland.

From 3 March 2010, a director of that same full legal name sat on the board of Aurelian Oil & Gas Limited, a London oil and gas company in which Kulczyk Investments was a substantial shareholder.

The two run in parallel for two years and ten months.

That is not, in itself, improper. Investors place people on the boards of companies they back; it is how the business works. It is recorded here because it is the single clearest picture the public record gives of where he sat — inside the investor and inside the investee at the same time.

What reporting says about that board

Coverage of the Aurelian board describes nine directors: three independent non-executives — Lord Prior as chairman, Malcolm Pattinson and David Walker — three non-executives representing substantial shareholders — Miles Donnelly, Dariusz Mioduski and Nick Coats — and three executives.

Madnani is not among the nine named in that description. Whether he sat as a shareholder representative, and for whom, the public record does not say. This archive does not fill the gap.

What the register does show is that he shared that boardroom with Dariusz Mioduski, of Kulczyk Investments, and with Lord Prior of Brampton, later a UK health minister and chairman of NHS England.

The day the board emptied

On 25 January 2013, San Leon Energy plc completed its acquisition of the Aurelian group by scheme of arrangement, buying from Kulczyk Investments, Toscafund Asset Management, Lord Sainsbury, Cheyne Capital Management, Radwan Investments, 55 North Capital Partners and the Aurelian directors themselves.

The officer register for that date reads like a door closing. Ten directors resigned. Three were appointed. Storey, Bainbridge, Conlin, Madnani, Matthews, Mioduski, Lord Prior, Rozwadowski, Smallwood and Walker out; King, Martin and Sullivan in.

A change of control ordinarily replaces a board, and this one did so completely and in a single day. It is recorded because it dates the end of his tenure precisely, and because a reader tracing his career should know that it ended in a takeover rather than a departure.

Two days after

He remained a director of Kulczyk Investments for another two and a half years.

Jan Kulczyk died in Vienna on 29 July 2015, following complications from cardiac surgery, aged 65. The register records the directorship as resigned on 31 July 2015.

Two days. This archive states the two dates and nothing more: filing dates and dates of resignation are not always the same thing, and no source has been located that explains the timing.

The identity question, sharpened

The Companies House record for the Aurelian directorship states a date of birth of November 1972. The record for the Kulczyk directorship states November 1970.

Read on their own, they could be two different men. Read against the overlap — the same full legal name, both British, both resident in the Emirates, sitting simultaneously on an investee company and on the investor that held a stake in it — that becomes very hard to sustain.

If they are one person, then one of the two birth years on a United Kingdom statutory filing is wrong. Companies House does not check what is filed with it, and this archive records the discrepancy without asserting how it arose.