Because the Renault offer wouldn’t enrich management. Their shares they have spent a lot of money buying would be severely devalued because as many have pointed out, the company just becomes a cash box with no proper asset. They’d have to go and acquire another asset which in all probability would be inferior to HMW, because all they know is lithium and there’s not that many good assets still for sale for that sort of cash.
Given they’ve now completely pivoted strategy (remember all JP’s digs at DLE over the years?) and they’re onto their third off taker/financier, you’d think the fair thing would have been to accept the Renault deal (or try to negotiate it a bit higher), cash out and do some sort of capital return to shareholders and wind up the business. That would have put JP out of a job but many of the others have multiple board positions/roles.
The problem now is that they will only own half the project, because whilst the resource remains 100% theirs, with the processing plant owned by Authium it makes any future takeover offers a bit more complicated. And this is all assuming that Authium themselves will be able to successfully build and operate a plant. I suspect this will push all the timelines out yet again.
As recently as 14 March in the HY report they were talking about the encouraging progress made with Chemphys. One month later they’ve completely changed the entire approach of the project that was literally years in the making. It really is madness they’re trying to do all of this without having done proper studies on it. If they quote the NPV from either of the DFS’ again the ASX should pull them up.
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