I'd like to say first, I wrote this on my phone so please ignore the spelling and formatting, I did my best
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With a lot of questions and dates being thrown around I want to make a post on what is my current understanding of where we are at with the MLA. The goal of this post is to help understand what the current delays are and when they *may* be resolved.
TLDR:
- Waiting on gazzetting of MLA fees- All MLA documents submitted to government- MLA will be considered officially submittedon gazzetting- Government overwhelmingly supportive of IXR, hold upadministrative only@roblum
Nice find on the 60 days roblum. However from my understanding the 60 days hasn't started yet. We know from the 28th of February that we are still waiting on the gazzetting of the MLA fees. Governments have a lot of inertia, it takes time for these things to go through all the checks and balances to be approved. Unfortunately from what I can see this is still the hold up so we are currently not counting down our 60 days.
What's the hold up?There seems to have been some confusion around some of the wording in official communication to whether we have actually submitted our application or not. This stems from the MLA fees not being finalised yet. Until this is complete we would not be able to "officially" submit our application. However, from announcements and shareholder communication, it looks like all the documentation should be with the Ugandan government already.
Once MLA fees are done we can "officially" submit. This would be done quickly through the application portal, so no time should be lost here, and our 60 days would begin then.
I'd also like to put out that 60 days is the upper limit. The retention license as an example looks to have been approved quite quickly. While an assumption, it would be reasonable to not take the complete 60 days, when by my understanding MLA paperwork has been previewed by the government while waiting on fee gazzetting.
With all the above said Our timeline is beholden to the gazzetting of the MLA fee. It is possible that we get approval by the end of june but that will rely on the finalization of the MLA fees and not on the 60 day window as has been stated. All IXR can do is pass on the most recent information given to them and at this moment that is June. This will be revised in announcements as they are updated.
Quick everyone panic!!!We have seen that the Ugandan government has been overwhelmingly supportive of IXR, so personally the license for me is more of a formality than anything else. We have had official government posts on twitter in our support, you don't do that when you are umm'ing and ahh'ing, this is my personal view though.
We need to remember that this project is of great benefit to Uganda and they have put a strong emphasis on supporting mining as seen through the rewriting and formalising of their mining laws to improve transparency and minimise corruption.
SNAFU...There seems to be a lot of impatience on HC at the moment, I have said the below in other forums as well. Unfortunately delays happen and I would almost argue that it is far more normal than everything running perfectly to schedule.
When we have delays we need to look at why they are happening. For us we have a bullish government with a great relationship to IXR who are waiting on the final tick to get this project moving forward.
Unfortunately shareholder timelines and wants hardly ever line up with those in government and regulatory bodies. As share holders we can do little to alter this but to understand the reasoning and make informed decisions based on this.
Cheers,
Frank
(20min delay)