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For immediate release

28 April 2009

Desire Petroleum plc

('Desire' or 'the Company')

Director Shareholding and Additional Listing

The Company announces that on 27 April 2009, Stephen Phipps, Chairman, Ian Duncan, CEO, and Anna Neve, a Non-executive Director exercised an aggregate of 1,195,599 options over new ordinary shares in the Company at an exercise price of 20.11p per share.

In addition, the same three directors have sold an aggregate of 714,487 ordinary shares at 30p per share.

Details of these transactions are set out below:

Director	No. of options exercised	No. of shares sold	Post-transaction shareholding
Stephen Phipps	478,239	178,239	33,722,633* (14.7%)
Ian Duncan	478,239	397,127	413.946** (0.18%)
Anna Neve	239,121	139,121	33,522,633* (14.6%)

* These include an interest in 30,582,633 shares held by Phipps & Company Limited and 2,840,000 shares held by the Phipps & Company Retirement Benefit Scheme.

** This includes 107,143 shares held by Chase Energy Limited.

Application has been made for 1,195,599 new ordinary shares to be admitted to trading on AIM and admission is expected to occur on 1 May 2009.  

Following the exercise of the options, there are 229,715,445 ordinary shares in issue. 

For further information please contact:

Desire Petroleum plc	020 7436 0423
Stephen Phipps, Chairman
Dr Ian Duncan, Chief Executive Officer
Seymour Pierce	020 7107 8000
Jonathan Wright
Buchanan Communications	020 7466 5000
Ben Willey Ben Romney

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