That is correct the results were never publicly reported on the...

That is correct the results were never publicly reported on the ASX. However, given the age of the Alara drilling this would be in the Mines Department in Chile or with the Vendor. The rock chips are, so why not the drilling. But short of HC punters paying for me to go to Chile I have no access to the results.

Given the steep option payments - 2012 being a very suckky time to be an exploration Co, it is understandable that Alara withdrew. Given they dropped the project there was no reporting requirements for the drilling to the ASX as the results were no longer material, and putting together announcements is time consuming.


The problem is that 5,000m of Drilling is a very significant amount of work (far more so than the rock chips we are being shown, given the significant mobility of CU in the weathering environment) and quite simply it's smelly that CPO have not even mentioned that there was the drilling of El Quillay, VM etc, conducted by Alara, let alone anything about results.

This leads one to suspect, without CPO coming clean about the past drilling, and given Alara's comment "drilling...... failed to confirm the presence of mineralisation that we were expecting" a number of possibilities:
1) Drilling by Alara returned fairly universally low grades 0.2-1% Cu under rock chips
2) Drilling by Alara only intersected very patchy mineralisation - Perhaps a hole here or there that had very high grades and CPO are using those holes to target current drill holes for great initial result / market ramping purposes to get funding.
3) Mineralisation that is good is pretty skinny (as per bottom of first CPO hole)

We have no idea and we don't even know which prospects got most of the attention.

Now with that being said plenty of discoveries get made where others have left off, and 5,000m is not really a huge amount of drilling over multiple prospects. Maybe the best ore body is still hiding under one of the undrilled prospects. But CPO are not drilling these at present only going back and drilling the prospects tested by Alara.