Texas Oil & Gas Magazine Vol 3. Issue 3 | Page 26

Cabot oil & Gas, Trustworthy is as trustworty does

he recent ranking of Cabot Oil & Gas as the fifth most trustworthy large cap company in America tells a great story of a great company, and provides some insight on recent controversies.Cabot Oil & Gas has been in the news a great deal lately because it has had the fortitude to deal with a serial trespasser who has put its landowners and operations at risk. There’s another story that ought to be getting more press though. It’s one that provides some important insight into the nature of the company and indicates who has a record of transparency and trustworthiness. Hint: it’s not the attention seeking activist with the unsavory record. No, Cabot Oil & Gas has been ranked by Forbes magazine as having the fifth most trustworthy large cap company in America.

Cabot Oil & Gas at the Top of Trustworthy Scale

The ratings used to establish the list of America’s 100 Most Trustworthy Companies were independently assembled by GMI Ratings, which “provides institutional investors, insurers and corporate decision-makers the most extensive coverage of environmental, social, governance and accounting-related risks.”

GMI Ratings provides a number of services for investors but the Forbes list comes from a particular ranking based upon “proprietary Accounting and Governance Risk (AGR®) ratings of more than 20,000 companies worldwide [that] have been shown to be predictive of adverse events such as securities class action litigation, financial restatements, and SEC enforcement actions.

The AGR scores are based on “discrete risk factors organized into categories such as revenue recognition, expense recognition, asset-liability valuation, governance risks and high-risk events. The higher the score on a scale of 1-100, the more trustworthy the company is considered to be. Cabot Oil & Gas had a current score of 86, which is puts it among the very best companies in reporting accurate financial information to its stockholders, the investment community and regulator

The AGR ratings serve to compare companies with their peers on the basis of those characteristics that have proven to be indicative of trustworthiness at the higher end of the scale. Cabot Oil & Gas ranks fifth among all American companies with over $5 billion in market capitalization value, a major achievement. Here’s some excerpts from Forbes that explain:

As one-time corporate superpowers Enron and WorldCom collapsed like dominoes, James Kaplan grew tired of the routine spin on financial wrongdoing. Kaplan, director of proprietary ratings provider and investment adviser GMI Ratings, wanted to find a way to identify nefarious corporate behaviors and, at the same time, spotlight companies who abstained…

Each year, GMI Ratings provides Forbes with a list of the 100 Most Trustworthy Companies in America. To develop the ranking, GMI reviews the accounting and governance behaviors of more than 8,000 publicly-traded companies in North America. In assessing each company, GMI

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Tom Shepstone, President of Shepstone Management Co.

www.NaturalGasNow.org.

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