For the past few years, Hurricane Hydrocarbons Ltd. has provided shareholders and sideline connoisseurs alike with more kicks than a Bruce Lee film festival.

Hurricane-watching has become the hottest spectator — speculator? — sport in town.

Season tickets are readily available on the TSE, for about nine bucks a share. Or just pull up an easy chair, and catch the fun for free.

As the company’s Calgary staffers will confirm, life’s never dull in the eye of the Hurricane.

Bernard Isautier

For the latest, check out the exploding scoreboard.

This week, Hurricane surprised nobody in particular by announcing that fourth-quarter cash flow in 2000 climbed to $178.5 million ($2.53 a share).

To get the 1999 figures, just divide that number by 10.

Gross revenues for the quarter totalled $523.2-million, up from $155.2-million in ’99’s fourth quarter.

Based on the bullish trend, the company’s predicting that this year’s production will climb by 30 per cent, just as it did in 2000.

And yet, less than two years ago, the company was bleeding all over a Calgary courthouse floor. Hurricane was carried into Court of Queen’s Bench on a stretcher, seeking relief from slumping oil prices, and a variety of corporate ills.

The company needed a breather — protection from creditors under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. Hurricane got it, along with a strict timetable for debt repayment.

Et, voila. By the end of last year, Hurricane was flush enough to flush away more than half its long-term debt, well ahead of schedule.

The comeback has had everything to do with the 1999 oilpatch revival, when oil prices stabilized, and gas prices streaked up a stairway to the stars.

It was also tied to Hurricane’s purchase last spring of majority interest in the Shymkent refinery in Kazakhstan, the remote, ex-Soviet republic where most of Hurricane’s assets lie — including 459 million barrels of light crude and 52 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

And, yes, that’s the same refinery which was targeted by a revenge-minded ex-exec, who stormed the premises with a band of mercenaries last December, like drunken extras from some 1960s Hollywood epic.

“Things are back to normal,” Bernard Isautier quickly reassured shareholders the next day from London, his base. The vaguely exotic Hurricane chairman/president/CEO did concede the wild, woolly episode had been a tad on the “weird” side.

A dual citizen of France and Canada, Isautier is another reason Hurricane draws such passionate interest from the cheap seats.

They say he owns an island in the South Seas, and one Calgary analyst calls him “aloof, and strategic. He got parachuted in (as CEO, September 1999) and has done a great job.”

That seems to be a consensus opinion. Still, the opinions of the pros vary widely, regarding Hurricane’s desirability as a purchase item.

One analyst sounded completely sold: “Hurricane’s a winner,” he said last week.

But another veteran patch-watcher, declining to be quoted, said he wouldn’t touch the stock with a barge pole, citing a corporate history of first-to-worst-to-first inconsistency.

This gent used Isautier’s own term to describe Hurricane’s infrastructure, saying it’s just plain “weird” for a company to maintain a skeleton staff in Calgary, while the boss works in England, and the meal ticket sits in the faraway, landlocked, independent republic of Kazakhstan.

A few years ago, ROB Magazine writer David Olive called mineral-rich Kazakhstan’s south central region a land of “flat, parched steppes.”

But Hurricane director Jim Doak, of Toronto, puts it another way. “Think Drumheller,” Doak said last week.

He gives the well-connected Isautier — a one-time adviser to France’s minister of energy — high marks for the robust turnaround.

Doak points to Isautier’s bagful of engineering, physics and business-admin degrees, and his track record with Canadian Occidental Petroleum Ltd., Aquitaine of Canada, and Canterra Energy Ltd. of Calgary.

But Doak also assigns credit to ex-CEO John Komarnicki, who pulled off a small miracle by raising enough funds to buy Hurricane’s Kazakhstan play in 1996, at a time when the company was virtually penniless.

He later left the company, during another of its almost routine administrative upheavals.

Another key builder has been Bob Kaplan, Canada’s former solicitor general. At one point, Kaplan took the reins as board chairman, and “really helped pull the company through a difficult time,” said Doak.

“For a while there, the company was running off Kaplan’s credit card,” he said, only half kidding.

Based on this week’s results, those days are a memory — at least until Taras Bulba and his madcap mercenaries decide to take another crack at that refinery.