Ann: Hawsons Signs Binding Agreement with Flinders Ports, page-70

I agree. It’s a ‘binding agreement’ to ‘co-operate on the potential development’ of an asset. Think about that language, it’s deliberately vague. Sorta like saying “I’ve signed a binding agreement to have a bunch of discussions about possibly doing something that someone else will be paying for”.

Now that the BFS is stalled, I expect you’ll see various announcements like this be drip-fed to the market. They need to keep the excitement/interest in the project alive, even though not much can happen from here. So there’ll probably be a series of exciting-sounding announcements, but when you drill into them there’s not much substance - perhaps just enough to support the SP until they can get more capital raised to keep funding themselves. Look at this announcement, it worked perfectly: very little substance but they got themselves an almost 10% increase in market cap.

Not suggesting there’s anything dishonest here, it’s just logical that management want to keep themselves in a job, and try and retain investor interest in the project - even though they’ve effectively put it on ice for the foreseeable future.