massive, page-152

"The facts are that AVB did apply for a "non-dilutive" loan from a bank.
Unfortunately the bank said they needed another $12 million from a second source to secure the loan. I'm guessing that either the bank would not accept a CR for the $12 million or AVB decided to keep their promise and they negotiated a deal with BlackRock.
All the way through this process AVB had kept their "promise" of minimal dilution.
Now it's at this point that the game changes because BlackRock also puts conditions on their $12 million. Conditions that are going to delay mine construction by 6 months minimum and conditions that require money to be spent on infill drilling."
Getting Blackrock on board has helped AVB tremendously in my opinion -
- obviously we are getting the $$$
- by making us do infill drilling for JORC we've found that what was thought to be thousands of tons of waste that we had planned to put on the waste pile is actually thousands of tons of ore - that info has well and truly paid for the drilling and a whole lot more.
- Blackrock has identified the choke point with the filter press being too small. The picture in one of their releases was of a Metso filter press - Metso make the best ones around, but even they can be temperamental and can have a lot of down time. You do need to oversize them to account for this otherwise not only do you end up with nothing happening down stream of the filter press, but you also end up having to shut the processing down all the way back to the crusher because the stock tanks feeding the filter press fill up when the filter press is offline and reach the point where they can't take any more. Even now that we are going with a bigger filter press I would put money on the filter press being the biggest root cause of lost processing time when we get into production, because not only has it directly caused lost time, but when you have to shut down the rest of the process plant you often get problems when you restart - pumps become bogged, impeller shafts snap, tanks overflow, and you have lost another few hours. In many ways it would be great if they went with two smaller-sized filter presses that could handle the total load+ say 20% as then if one filter press fails the other is still running - and slowing down the feed rate to the crusher is far less troublesome than stopping everything then starting up again.