Ann: Appointment of New CEO & Managing Director, page-128

I'm going to take the company's announcement that Guido was taking a pay cut on face value. The company trying to do the right thing in the face of bad news/performance last year. Yes David's comms style leaves a lot to be desired - he's there to fulfil a statutory role in the business (ensure the company meets its reporting obligations as per the Companies Act and ASX listing rules. He's living in the most remote capital city on Earth whilst all the people doing all the fun tech stuff are cracking on in Silicon Valley or Belgium. He's one of the few who has actual money in the game and probably thought he would be free of all of this by now, instead of announcing short loops and platform lot partial failures and having to do all the paperwork to put another cap raise in motion.

To announce a CEO appointment shortly after - maybe the company thought the process would take longer and wanted to keep it on the down-low until they had a contract signed. Maybe the process DID take longer than anticipated and the new CEO appointment, pay/role reduction for Guido and the new testing gear was all meant to happen simultaneously. There are a lot of good reasons companies keep a CEO search quiet - one being if it takes ages to find someone, the uncertainty starts to weigh on the SP and apropos of nothing, you get people suggesting that the tech doesn't work.

I'm going to take a punt that the new CEO wouldn't sign on until the short loop work had been completed and as such, he knew the platform lot was definitely going ahead. I'm sure all prospective appointments signed an NDA before heading into the selection and negotiation process so all prospects were well across what has occurred at Stanford and IMEC.