Examining the insider selling case, page-8

I think he got "fired".

Because the new General Manager was to directly report to the MD. That tells us the MD had not as much control over operations as he would have liked. Headquarters pushed for higher production because the financial situation required it and they had unrealistic expectations of what could be done.

Ken is responsible for the mill issue and the June quarter. But those things happen and there was no rock sheeting possible in the early stages.

Also Purvis mentioned good momentum in October and November. That was after the decision to relief Ken from his active role. They still needed him for relations with government officials though.

The construction of Karouni did have some mishaps, delays and cost overruns. But take a look at that:
http://www.criticalinvestor.eu/research/articles/black-box-ni-43-101-reports

"Our benchmark model (see Figure 3) calculates initial capital for a 2750 tonne per day open pit mine and mill would be $112 MM, over 50% higher than the PFS estimate."

"One other item bears mentioning. Condor reasonably estimated a two-year construction period. Troy, on the other hand, unrealistically estimated only one year for construction. Troy issued a project update on July 10, 2015, noting that startup had been delayed from June 2015 until September 2015 due to a variety of fairly serious problems with mill installation and alignment. This type of problem and resulting delay are typical of poorly engineered and executed projects."

What we essentially got (take a look at the independent technical review from June 2016) was costs being spot on (but maybe not 100% finished) and 4 months delay.
So Ken was $40m cheaper than Brent Cook estimated such a project could be built for and 16 months to complete the project against 2 years Brent Cook told us were necessary. So way better than anyone else. We all know the issues during operations after that. Given the track record (no problems at Hicks, flawless performance at Andorinhas) I do not agree with the rest of Brent Cook's statement.

What Ken did at Karouni was exactly what Troy is known for. Move in, produce with starter plant, explore, grow. Only as much reserve definition as necessary. For now the operation is stuck in bad production with the starter plant and due to the lack of reserve definition capital at a reasonable price is hard to get. The Troy way of doing things only works with a strong balance sheet.