Back home after the meeting. First the positives - it was great to see so many of the HC crowd there holding management's feet to the fire. It was also great to catch up with so many of you both before and after the meeting.
Now for the negative. I was very surprised to see Christiaan & Cobus at the meeting even though for me this was a positive. Peter was wisely "overseas" (where was not mentioned) so it was the the Ian, CJ and CVW show.
Ian tried to tell us how great a year MUS had had (yep great up until the auction when hype became reality). We went through the resolution dance, the only interesting thing is CVW managed to mess up his section when we got to Ian "bonus" resolution for a job well done.
After we finished voting we moved onto Cobus' presentation. I had never met or even seen Cobus before so I was looking forward to this. Let's say the explaination provide for why the auction was such a failure was not impressive. The basic claim was that Philip (the former Gemfields' consultant) set them up to fail. This actually might be true, but since they apparently didn't seem to apply even the most basic due diligence on the grading system it just supported the thesis that they are totally incompetent.
CJ was quizzed about his resignation and the pre-auction claim that we should expect "north of US$100/ct". He tried to claim the resignation was for "personal" reasons and even went so far as to claim that he had never said $100/ct - to both claims the whole room was incredulous.
The room continued to pepper the board with question which were not well answered. The overall impression was one of the Keystone Cops try to mine and sell rubies. We were asked to beleive that even though they managed to mess up the direct sale model, and also the auction model, that they now know what they were doing (the new model is direct sales in Asia of small parcels of rough stones) and the future rosy. No rational explaination was provided for the missing cut specials, but Cobus did say that that any shareholder who wanted to look at them could arrange this???
Even though they just admitted they could not get right the most basic mining project (digging up rubies is about as simple as mining gets), we were told the company is spending 500K in the next few weeks on the graphite. How this is going to be advanced given the capital intensive requirements of graphite mining was not explained.
I am rather torn. If everything was just due to incompetence then the new MD might be able to turn things around, what worries me is the new MD will be chosen by our current board. I have not decided what I will do with my MUS shares, but I do really, really, really want to see a clean out of the board.
MUS Price at posting:
3.4¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
