"From my own perspective, this very long trading halt and the...

"From my own perspective, this very long trading halt and the failure of the IDC to confirm the loan after all this time is extremely concerning. I also think back to the proposed LMC line of credit and wonder why tht never materialised either."

I think it's quite ominous that the company suddenly points out a lot of risks pertaining specifically to the fund raising activity and its impact on the project (scale down is a possibility) and most worrying is a warning for retail investors. This does not come from a confident company that knows what it's doing and has things figured out in advance. It looks like it's groping around the dark trying to find a way to progress this project in a haphazard way.

In light of what happened, it is clear that the company over-estimated its ability to raise funding on favorable terms. When Lindsay was first asked about the funding years ago in an interview video, at that time he stuttered and said it's gonna be funded by equity in a not-so-confident way (I made a comment about this). Now with hindsight I think it was probably because he had never been confident that they would secure a sizeable, meaningful offtake and prepayments (no offtake yet at that time, and still no prepayments now). What seemed more feasible to them was selling the product to small farmers via IFDC route and thus large offtakes didn't seem likely, so at that particular moment, debt was out of the question.

Then P4 came along, Carrinho offtake came along, cost improvements, GA, etc. so the company might have thought they now have plenty of options. The LMC that you mentioned, it was either 1/ not on good terms, 2/ has conditions that MNB failed to meet even to this day, or 3/ worst case, it might not have been a genuine deal from the start, just something the company used to ease investors and made it look like funding is easy (it certainly succeeded in making many here believe funding is a sure thing, until they actually have to start the construction). Ironically, if the reason was 1/ not on good terms, it seems MNB has been going around in circles trying to get a better deal (because it thought it would be in a much stronger position now after all the fluffy announcements) but struggling to secure something it thought it would be able to achieve easily: funding on favorable terms.

I wrote before that IDC loan might require MNB to have more offtakes and/or prepayments, which still hasn't happened yet.

P4 vs export considerations: I am not even sure that MNB has figured out this question by now, maybe that's one of the reasons why it's taking so long: working with different stakeholders who have competing objectives from the company?

Lots of the things I said above are personal guesses/inferences that might be wrong. But all in all, I think the key takeaways here are: funding has been extremely challenging for this project of national significance, Minbos overestimates its ability to get funding (which isn't a surprise given that its estimates on timelines are equally terrible), and it is in a critical condition now.

We might or might not get funding, but if we do, I have a feeling that the terms are going to be pretty bad. We will see.