Edmonds ends White Nile's hunt for oil and turns farmer

One of the more extraordinary stock-market stories of recent years ended today as ex-England cricketer Phil Edmonds stopped his search for oil in Sudan and instead said he is trying his hand at farming in Africa.

At the beginning of 2005 Edmonds brought White Nile to market at the height of the investment boom in small untried oil explorers.

Within days the phrase White Nile Fever had been coined as the stock soared from 10p at float to 138p in a week. That made paper fortunes for Edmonds and his coterie of shadowy investors, who were outed by the Evening Standard as a clutch of London's star hedge-fund managers including Philip Richards of RAB Capital and George Robinson of Sloane Capital. While many in the City jumped on the White Nile steamer, veteran market-watchers took an alternative view.

Simon Cawkwell, the trader known as Evil Knievel, loudly short-sold the stock and got into a war of words with Edmonds and his bag-carrier Andrew Groves, while broker Tony Craze wondered whether White Nile would simply be another Knutsford, Archie Norman's 1999 float, which soared to a market valuation of £700 million without a single asset before abandoning its grandiose plans. White Nile was valued at one stage at £300 million, helping put a £140 million tag on Edmonds' interests in various African ventures.

But it soon became clear that while White Nile was being challenged on its legal rights to drill in southern Sudan, its future was in doubt because of the civil war in the country. Today White Nile gave up.

Edmonds said he is renaming the company Agriterra and will divert the business's £5 million of cash reserves to "acquire or invest in businesses or projects operating in the agricultural and associated civil engineering industries in Africa".

His move came as global agricultural prices hit lows not seen since early 2007. White Nile shares are at 2½p, down 1⁄8p.