q's and response from management, page-6

Sofiya,

It is clearly you that is naive, not STB's management.

The suggestion/assertion you make is simply not an option available to management, and if it were and they used it, then you'd no doubt be amongst the first and strongest critics.

You need to realise that sometimes the plot unfolds unfavourably despite competent management doing the right things - such is the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

As for your RIO, the company that stumbled into $40bn aluminium hole, and was devising ways to destroy what was left of itself about the time STB's management stumbled upon the Eritrean project for next to no cost. As for BHP, the company with the serial habit of destroying billions through poor acquisition, poor execution or misjudgement of commodity markets. The company that gave half it's equity away to the South Africans for a basket of mostly second rate assets.

STB management appear to me a cut more astute than that of either imho, but sometimes, esp with high risk projects, that may not be enough.

EL