Bootleg, I can understand where your sympathy lies, but in my opinion there is too much uninformed and possibly purposely distorted information being bandied around. People praised Red Frog's detailed and balanced contribution on the one hand and totally overlooked his "now to the present" contribution where he rightly suggested that the massive dilution involving unlisted options was not in shareholders favour and should not have gone ahead, and also his suggestion that the partly paid deals should be examined as well. Now I see his motives are being questioned?
The two people you refer to from the ex-Skook camp did learn what not to do, you're quite right. What you neglected to comment on was what they did do. In my opinion they switched from selling tenements to gullible directors for vast share benefits to taking control and helping themselves to vast share wealth from gullible shareholders. -Easy, b#@@er the shareholders, and no need to muck around obtaining tenements to trade either.
There is an attempt to insinuate and label the previous directors DM & JD as self-serving and incompetent, and praise the current directors as not being so And to boot, have us believe that the current directors discovered the iron mineralisation and are somehow the saviours of shareholder wealth. Well, competence has always been in short supply when mining expertise is absent and it still is.
Let's look at the facts of a small explorer like GPN. Tenement acquisition and an attempt at diversification in mineral exploration is not per se a wrong strategy. You can't damn the failure of the gold exploration, and, at the same time damn the attempt to diversify into uranium tenements, which strategy was thought (rightly or wrongly) to be a healthy backup for GPN. Maybe DM didn't trade tenements as well as he traded cars, but, as with all readers contributing to this forum, I wasn't privy to the availability and the demand/supply pressure on tenements at the time. Thus, I can't comment other than to say I questioned and was bitterly disappointed with the massive dilution that took place during this time.
Having said that, I also have to say that another major Pine Creek Geosyncline or Alligator River discovery that brought in Canadian, Chinese or French capital, or another Bigryli on Turner's Dome would have made this strategy look very good, especially in light of the gold failure. This latter tenement may still prove this point.
I would have liked if the directors had locked on to the iron distribution earlier as Vortex has eloquently stated several times in his contributions, however, I also note that the recognition of iron mineralisation distribution was a developing awareness, and it still is if we are objective (and haven't got a political agenda). Failures are greatly magnified by informed hindsight especially in the Police force and in mining. Vortex was proved right.
It is not uncommon for enthusiastic gold explorers to drill prospective tenements for this stuff and quite often live to see someone else find it much later.
Enthusiasm might sell cars, but it is not that effective in locating a rich gold seam. So, even though it produces a colourful story and later provokes disapproval and verbal diarrhoea in others, it is not the crime here. Ask yourself honestly, which set of directors personally enriched themselves at shareholder expense, and which set of directors not only enriched themselves but hid the enrichment from shareholders? Were they voted the options and shareholdings transparently by the shareholders, or were they obtained by other means, directed to, and concealed in companies not known to the general shareholding public, under the guise of capital raisings to sophisticated directors - sorry, "investors".
Ask yourself also, while you're thinking about it, was there a conflict of interest in the way the AGU/GPN gold j/v was changed into an iron ore j/v when, on finding there was no gold and GPN had massive iron ore on its tenements (thought by the geologist to be possibly as much as 2 billion tonnes), directors with large AGU shareholding varied the terms of the j/v to give AGU 30% of the iron ore. Was there an open discussion, and an informed vote on this? Were most shareholders even made aware of the massive iron ore on GPN tenements that Schwann was reporting back to directors even before the board coup was engineered? (The iron mineralisation was already known Lord Koala.)
The irony to me is to me that when the previous directors DM, DJ et all (who belatedly organised the broad exploration including Hyvista) decided that the Skook name had to be removed from the share registry to obtain credible exploration and project financing and took steps to being it about by bringing in new directors and a million dollar capital raising, the new directors moved quickly to take board control, subsequently directing massive new options into their own companies.
Again in my opinion, these same directors were slow to reveal the true extent of the mineralisation on GPN tenements for reasons other than just underpinning the value of their AGU shares. IMO, they were conveniently tardy delaying programmes including drip-feeding Hyvista findings, tenement FE mineralisation mapping and rock chip sampling programmes and drilling to prevent a possible blow-out in the GPN share price. This allowed them to disguise a billion plus share option grab in a massive iron resource as a "venture capital" type raising (except that very little capital was raised by doing this b#@@er the company).
When Bungy234 reports with apparent distaste that Mac transparently got 37.5 million options + 2.5 million YRR options and conveniently ignores the current directors and de facto directors billion + line of options in PDY (at .0003, Red Frog) at their first dip, not to mention the millions of shares and options and, (God-forgive-them, because I don't think I can), the millions of partly-paid's in AGU and YRR, and then a second dip into PDY with free options (because they "hadn't raised enough cash"!!!), and Divros calling Mac the "vending machine", they lose all credibility.
Anxiety over privacy issues also takes on a new light. IMO, only the few with access to this brazen heist and enrichment could attempt to justify it. On the other hand, I've got to agree with Divros when he admits to loving transparency. I think we can both shout, "Thank God for freedom of information legislation!"
I don't suppose I can use Vortex's famous, "where there's smoke there's mirrors" sign-off, can I?? Nah, thought not.
PDY Price at posting:
1.6¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held