Just to show that the WA lithium sector is quite a tiny community, the Charger MD, David Crook was MD of Essential Metals (used to be Pioneer) for 16 years. At the end of 2020 in their AGM presentation Pioneer, while DC was still the MD, stated that they had turned their focus fully onto gold. Terrible timing! This was a turnaround as in the 3 or so years before then - during when the lithium price and sector was crashing - their focus had been on caesium and lithium being extracted from spodumene. They had even increased their lithium mineral resource estimate in September 2020 but then seemingly gave up on lithium and turned to gold.
Within a few months of the pivot away from lithium DC was gone from Pioneer, Pioneer changed its name to Essential Metals and it consolidated its issued shares. A full clean out by the board. By the latter part of 2021 the new CEO at Essential Metals was beating on the drum that ESS was one of only 12 companies with an Australian lithium MRE and that it could be the next CXO. Not many picked up on this sales pitch for a few months. It was only at the start of 2022 that the ESS share price trebled in a couple of weeks.
I only recently started tracking these lithium hopefuls so I don't know whether it was DC who decided in late 2020 to turn away from lithium. Looks like bad timing all round for him as it was under him they JORCed up the lithium resource just as the lithium sector crashed and then he moved on before the market picked up that the company has a mineable amount of lithium and that the lithium had recovered.
Some of the old Pioneer holders seem to think Mr Crook was treated badly. In any case in his 16 years at Pioneer / Essential Metals he did have a series of wins with the drill bit but it is also fair to say he never manged to make a corporate success of Pioneer. Interesting to see what he can make corporate-wise of the assets he has with Charger.
Is having Lithium Australia so heavily involved in Charger a good or bad thing? Anyone got a view on that?
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