THE London Stock Exchange suspended trading in White Nile after shares in Phil Edmonds’s speculative oil vehicle soared by up to 38 per cent.

The intervention adds to the farce surrounding White Nile, which listed on AIM in February but due to lengthy suspensions has traded for only two weeks. Those two weeks, however, have been sufficient for White Nile’s tightly held shares to soar from their 10p float price to as high as 176p yesterday. The shares were trading at 141p, up 15p, when AIM’s regulators suspended trading.

The suspension was triggered by the regulators’s concerns at a lack of “orderliness” in White Nile share trading. Its shareholder base is close-knit and those investors who had shorted the stock, on expectations that a much-hyped oil deal in southern Sudan would collapse, have this week scrambled to cover their positions.

Complicating matters is that 99 per cent of White Nile’s shareholders have irrevocably backed the oil deal, under which southern Sudan’s rebel government will take a 50 per cent stake in the company. The support effectively leaves only an estimated one million White Nile shares as free float, compared with about 3.5 million shares worth of short positions.

Neither White Nile nor Numerica, its financial adviser, would comment on the suspension. Mr Edmonds is understood to be abroad. However, a market maker in White Nile criticised AIM’s intervention.

An AIM spokesman said: “The exchange suspended the shares of White Nile because of concern over the orderliness of the market.”

White Nile became the latest in a stable of stocks promoted by Mr Edmonds, the former England cricketer. Like several of his other ventures, White Nile’s shares were tightly held when the company floated.

However, excitement about the potential of a deal in Sudan propelled White Nile’s share price, fuelled further by the free-stock shortage.

Mr Edmonds was forced to call for a suspension of trading only a week after White Nile listed while he finalised the Sudanese deal. The shares returned to trading on Monday, after a three-month suspension, and defied pessimists by retaining much of their pre-suspension value.

Under the Sudan deal White Nile will receive a 60 per cent stake in the Block Ba oilfield, which experts could contain up to five billion barrels of oil.