TLG - Media, page-10990

Mark talking about the ACC non-binding agreement:

"I think the first thing it did is showed that we have a viable product. That Talnode-C works, convinces people that someone's tested it. Secondly, while it's non-binding at this stage, we are moving towards binding very soon. It's slated to be moved to binding by the end of next month. That will help underpin project finance. The ACC deal is for about 60,000 tons of anode over 5 years and that would represent about 60% of our planned stage one production, so it sort of de-risks from a funding perspective the ability for banks and other lenders to underwrite your project. So It's pretty significant on both those terms."

ACC would take a similar approach/risk analysis to these financial institutions and would only sign the binding agreement if Talga was not cash strapped. Therefore, the capital raise enables the ACC agreement to become binding. The ACC binding agreement enables further project finance from EIB etc.

This seems pretty obvious now, but the timing of the raise did cause some confusion and anger, with questions of "why not after the agreement becomes binding at a higher share price?" I think many were also hoping for one of these banks to step in before a CR was required, however I don't think this would've been possible without a binding agreement after reading what Mark said above.

Thanks @Gero for posting. Great interview and well worth the listen.