Ann: Results of Annual General Meeting , page-44

Hi Poet, Great post as always..

My take on the drilling is as follows:
a) the entire 50,000m drill programme will have been budgeted for, including the lab costs. Drilling progress will be dictated by drill rig availability alone and perhaps management's changes of target priority.
b) The labs are an inconvenience for results reporting but will certainly not slow down the drill programme: cores can be stored onsite almost indefinitely (long term risk is collapse of storage facilities (rotting shelves/pallets etc) causing loss of cores' indentities.
c) if a further drill programme is required (as I hinted at a while ago) then this will need to be costed and budgeted for separately: either a capital raising or from royalties from Vale etc

The Trial Mining Licence is a huge leap forward although it also brings transitional risk with it. Now that it's been granted, the clock is ticking: the market has expectations. ATP cannot simply sit on this and wait for results of a second drill programme to come through (12-18 months away): he's effectively backed himself into a corner and has to start mining quite soon.

We aren't as cashed up as people think.. $80-120m is 'cashed-up'. $16m is simply mid term operational expenses for an exploration company: to a 'mining' company it's peanuts. So.. options:

I doubt we'd be looking at purchasing mobile quarrying equipment as this is expensive and requires a lot of outlay for maintenance activities. Unless there is a JV agreement with someone (Vale/Xtrata?) to loan capital equipment to the JV project then my bet would be for contract mining. For this to take effect and mining to start there would also need to be an offtake agreement. Does anyone know if a product offtake agreement was mentioned at the AGM? If so this would be as important a piece of info as the TML itself..

BT