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Is Jason Ward vulnerable? Do you think he will be out soon, if a new broom CEO comes in and wants to sweep the place clean of Mather's loyalists? Does his role as head of exploration allow him to distance himself from the strategic decisions made over the last few years? During those webinars last summer if felt like Ward was the de facto number two at Solg, but not heard much from him since.
One thing that bugs me about the whole re-election business is that if you were to take the official story at face value, that he let it be known that he intended to retire in the summer but he wanted to secure re-election so that he could remain on the board as a NED, then I feel like I was essentially duped into voting for something that wasn't true.
As things stood pre-AGM the choice appeared to be either re-elect Mather as a director so that he can continue as CEO and keep playing hardball to defend Solg against a lowball takeover, or don't re-elect him and he will be out as CEO and we will begin the slide into the hands of the majors who would happily buy us out for 50p max.
When in reality if you believe the Solg version of events, the choice was either re-elect him so that he can step aside anyway, or don't re-elect him as above. Would I have voted differently if I had known? Maybe not, but it just adds to a bit of a sense of being kept in the dark or being fed incorrect statements after the fact.
Also, if it is true, were the major shareholders BHP, NCM and CGP aware of his intentions anyway prior to the AGM and still decided to put the boot in and block him from staying on as a NED? Seems somewhat provocative if they already knew he was planning to quit.
Price drives narrative, which seems to be what's happening here. I don't really see what has changed fundamentally, Alpala was always going to be producing only in the late 2020s, and the Capex was always going to be many multiples of Solg's curren mcap, and they always have had a concurrent need for funding to progress multiple other targets. And yet I don't recall Cornford screaming sell, sell, sell in his previous few articles, or arguing that this was a car crash happening in slow motion. But now the PFS has been delayed (to optimize it for possibly cheaper and faster routes to production) and the SP has gone down, he basically says "I told you so" as if he always did see this as completely unfeasible...
Schadenfreude is not really a very nice way to get your kicks. Saying it's a pity you aren't even getting to enjoy your schadenfreude (in the form of GGP investors losing money on their investments) seems doubly mean spirited.
Risk reward is too unfavourable in BTC at this price, not that many crypto hodlers have any concept of risk. Time to buy would have been around $5k as it seems to follow a fairly predictable 4 year pattern with the halvenings or whatever they're called. The way I see it, with BTC at almost 50k it's easy to get drawn in and think what if it goes to 100k and I miss out? But it's highly likely at some point to have some absolutely epic drawdown of like 75% or something. So is it really worth risking 50% plus of your capital right now in order to achieve a gain of 100%? I'd say no, because if I'm risking 50% plus of my capital I want much bigger rewards than that.
Bought ORR at 1.25p. Now it could easily plummet to 0.6p, which I'm aware of, but it could equally well multibag from here to several pence, maybe if all goes amazingly into double digit pence. That's much better risk reward for me. If I wanted something that's going to maybe at best double over the next year, I want a much lower risk of suffering a huge loss and much lower volatility. I can't see BTC going to even 150k from here without some extreme drawdowns along the way.
H-hi. Firstly the big US banks such as GS, JPM, BofA etc are no longer allowed to engage in proprietary trading, it is prohibited under the Volcker rule. They facilitate and execute client orders and take positions for hedging client facing positions, but they are not allowed to trade against the street for their own account (which they were doing before 2008).
Secondly wealth management and asset management is one of the key target growth areas for most large banks these days which they see as a huge market for earning extra revenues when traditional areas are being squeezed by regulation and other factors. When banks like GS produce research predicting a commodities super cycle and they are advising their own WM clients to get ahead of this by investing. Their FAs will be using this to position client portfolios and the banks markets division will be structuring institutional client trading ideas based on this view.
From a commercial perspective it would be suicide for major banks to promote one viewpoint and advise their clients accordingly when they actually held the opposite view.
Good article thanks. I wonder if people make the mistake of equating demand for gold and silver coins with demand for gold bullion for good delivery. If the mints can only make a fixed number of coins per month, then the supply squeeze is going to be in the minted coins themselves, not the raw material (bullion) that the mints need to buy to make the coins? Perhaps why dealers are selling coins for 30-40% premium over spot?
To be clear, I am bullish on gold and silver prices in the next couple of years and hold quite a bit. Paper prices will catch up, just a matter of time. Good for ORR.
Can someone please explain how NM came to have this vendetta with CGP anyway? What's the background, other than he would have liked to own their remaining 15% of ENSA?
Maxit Capital (Bob Sangha) is CGP's advisor and major shareholder, but I'm pretty sure a few years ago Maxit were working for Solg to facilitate an equity placing. What's the story with Maxit and Solg as well?
Was there some previous Mather company that some of the CGP "crew" fell out with Mather over?
Thanks.
Yes I wasn't attacking your 100% statement as such, I realise that was just an example. Was just highlighting that it may have touched on the issues surrounding the plan for Alpala in terms of attitudes towards upfront costs and timing.
Hi Quady - last night you made a comment about the potential Capex cost for Alpala: "if it was a 100% increase then it would still be a bargain, go back and read the PEA. Under 4 years on current PEA, even with the increased cost, the payback will be shorter." I wonder if actually this goes to the heart of why Nick Mather came a cropper over the PFS once the new directors came on board.
Being an explorer, and very keen to become a producer, perhaps his views on costs were at odds with what people with a background in major miners would see as acceptable. Alpala is expected to have a 55 year life. As you said the payback period for the Capex is expected to be a 4 or 5 years. Maybe Mather had a more cavalier attitude to upfront spending because he was focused on the goal of producing and the eventual rewards. If the $5bn estimate was creeping up to $6bn, perhaps his attitude was "who cares, we'll just have to pay it off in 6 years instead of 5, and then get our billions." Therefore he had little appetite to drill more of Cascabel, re-design the mine and delay the PFS for a year.
Maybe Keith Marshall and Kevin O'Kane had a much more rigid focus on costs and couldn't stomach a large 10-20% increase in Capex. Irrespective of what happens after payback period, their attitude was perhaps more like "hang on, we can't tolerate a 20% capex increase, if we could re-design the mine and reduce it by even 5% then it's worth delaying the PFS to achieve that."
After all, NM was happy to grant the 1% NSR, which in and of itself sounds small, but raised serious concerns for NCM about diluting the future value of Alpala... Small cost percentages matter.
If someone controls 50%+ of the voting shares then they can effectively control the company by voting out the board and voting in a new board that will do what they want.
If a bidder makes a contractual offer (i.e. tender your shares for us to purchase) then I think it needs minimum 50% uptake to be successful and the bidder would normally include a conditional threshold in the offer, e.g. 90% or whatever. So if they didn't achieve the threshold, then the offer is not binding and the tendered shares are not taken up (such as Solg's bid for CGP). If a holder manages to gain 90% of the shares, then can make a compulsory purchase to squeeze out the remaining 10%.
If the bidder structures their bid as a scheme of arrangement, then I believe it only requires 75% shareholder acceptance in order to bind all holders (and squeeze out the remaining 25%). However a scheme of arrangement involves obtaining a court order from the High Court so is less likely in a hostile situation, more likely under a friendly bid with board recommendation.
If a shareholder acquires 30% of the voting shares then it must make a mandatory offer, which I think can only be conditional on 50% acceptances.
Also minimum consideration requirement is that if a bidder has acquired shares in the 3 months prior to the beginning of the offer period, or after the start of the offer period, then the offer cannot be on less favourable terms.
Isn't the whole point of a pre-feasibility study that it's not confirmed yet that it's either practically or economically feasible to build the mine? Hence the "if a development decision is made". It's just prudent corporate comms isn't it? If they were making statements at this stage like "when the mine build commences" they would be misleading the market because as a point of fact, the decision hasn't been made and it isn't guaranteed, no matter how likely it is to go ahead.
I took this as another sign they are attempting to rein in the hype (e.g. "this hole is the single biggest discovery in the history of Solgold" or whatever he said about Porv) and strike a bit more of a balanced tone.
Hi Rich3r, yes I was wondering about that myself.
Also speaking of BHP, when they did their Nov 2019 placing, the RNS stated "SolGold has invited, and BHP may provide, secondees for the technical effort for the completion of Feasibility Studies at SolGold's 85% owned Cascabel project in Northern Ecuador and regional exploration effort." I wonder if BHP did ever provide any secondees for the PFS effort, and if so what influence they may have had. I don't think we did ever hear that they had so maybe not.
Perhaps if they had taken technical advice from NCM who are meant to be the experts in this field, it would now look less bad for the Solg board.
Changing the title to focus on the company not the arguments. Pillar26 raised a good point. Whether we like them or not, NCM are a mining major, they are one of Solg's larget shareholders and they are recognised as block caving experts. When they openly criticised Solg's strategy, pulled their director from the board and made noises about the Alpala core potentially having been mis-defined, maybe those were warning signs we all should have listened to. Must admit, I was probably blinded by the view that of course they would be critical because their goal is to squeeze the junior with dilution and then snap it up on the cheap, and that NM was valiantly standing up to their bullyboy tactics.
However, that raises two questions for me. Was pulling their director about more than just financing? The reason given was the FNV deal, but could there have been broader doubts for them about the way the PFS and plan for Alpala was developing? And secondly, if they weren't happy, why pull their board director? They clearly intend to stay invested, why not have a person on the board to try to influence the direction of travel? Giving up their board seat seems to give them less direct influence. He may have been running up against a brick wall in NM, but NM is now gone but NCM doesn't have a seat at the boardroom table.