At an EGM next month, shareholders in gas company Metgasco are being asked to choose between voting the company's largest shareholder off the board, or voting off three of the other four directors. Or indeed, they could vote for all resolutions and leave the $24 million company almost entirely rudderless, apart from one very new board director who has so far managed to avoid the fray.

M&A Advisory's Andrew Purcell joined the Metgasco board in highly contentious circumstances two years ago. But it seems the differences between him and chairman Alexander Lang didn't abate. In an extraordinary memorandum to shareholders lodged on the ASX, most of Metgasco's board – including Lang, Philip Amery and Keybridge Capital representative John Patton – urge shareholders to turf Purcell out, saying Purcell's actions while on the board have shown him to be acting in his own interests and not in those of the broader company.