Karl Watkin, the Newcastle entrepreneur, sparked the wrath of shareholders by selling out his shares in Just2Clicks, his dot-com company, for £3.4 million shortly before it began winding itself up.

The future of his second AIM venture, D1 Oils, a planter and refiner of jatropha plants to make biodiesel, could also be grim. Its shares slid 36p to 62p yesterday on a warning that its refining business was being undermined by subsidised US biofuel imports. Luckily, Mr Watkin, a nonexecutive director who moved from chairman a year ago, sold £1.51 million of his shares last summer at 268p and 242½p.

D1 is considering shedding half the 95 staff at its two UK refinery sites and one refinery, at Bromborough, may be shut down. The company burnt through most of its £49 million cash in the six months to last June buying and building the refineries while trading losses were £10 million. Dresdner, the house broker, reckons D1 will need new funding by next year as cash from its jatropha crop is some way away.

Mr Watkin is also a director of China Goldmines, down 4p at 116½p. Investors should note that he sold half his stake for just over £1 million last month at 104p “to settle a tax liability”.

The coal sector came alight after Polo Resources, the Mongolian coal-miner with assets in Australia, off ¼p at 13¼p, raised a £125 million war chest for acquisitions through a share placing that more than doubled its market cap. A likely target is the Australian miner Caledon Resources, up 1p at 56p, in which it built a 7 per cent stake this week. Polo’s chairman, Stephen Dattels, and its chief executive, Paul Ingram, used to be chairman and exploration director of Caledon. Coal International, the US coal producer that is already in bid talks with an unknown party, soared 7½p to 33½p. Coal of Africa, the South African miner, rose ¾p to 94p on strong institutional buying with some seven million shares changing hands.

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