Most oil companies have pretty rigorous security provisions in place so on the face of it, that would not appear to be anything out of the ordinary - standard practice for the industry.
Now with respect to the notion that an entity or entities might be gobbling up small incremental chunks of the company at some point one or more of these entities may well trigger a reporting threshold and have a legal obligation to report. It is when they fail to do so, at such a point in time, they've committed an illegal act and would be subject to prosecution. Absent any information to tell us that any one of these parties is amassing such large (reportable) positions in company stock, we have to assume there is no such concentration of shares being accumulated by any one or more parties. If they are and said parties are not reporting the large concentrations you allude to that changes the dynamic a bit but of course how would we know if they were not forthcoming with timely reporting? Seems to me that it is that if there are multiple parties doing what you suggest and they are all failing to report, it would not likely be an oversight but one might then surmise such actions would have a deliberate purpose aimed at manipulating the market for the stock and defrauding the other shareholders through such subterfuge. And when it is a coordinated effort by more than one individual there's a good chance the Feds would take an interest in looking at it from an organized crime (racketeering) perspective. But we have not seen evidence of that yet have we?
Your point about internal rates of return on new projects is well taken. And based on what you stated, it seems like a very high cost of capital to invest to recognize such a nominal return. Is there more to that story than the shareholders are aware of? Hard to say as no one has told us much of anything about it.
