Ann: Extension of Voluntary Suspension, page-14

From the ann:
ubject
ss "subject to their internal governance compliance review".

wowog:

"all the complexity shouldve been nailed down before the halt"

It would have.
Governance issues relating to AOH would have been dealt with by the counterparty before they even started crunching numbers with AOH and spending their hard earned cash on feasibility assessments etc.

IMO the ann is a polite way of AOH saying there is a lot of bureaucracy in Chinese government run entities and there is a need for face saving and ticking off their own internal decision making.

It is their internal governance, not ours. IMO it is highly probable that the very top officials are requiring lawyers from their side to go through the agreement [probably line by line, to explain the legal effect and make sure it represents the company's wishes.

IMO what we are probably looking at is a cultural phenomenon which is exaggerated by the face-saving pretence at the very upper levels that the person/s on whose signature/s we are waiting, might poise the pen and declare that deal might be reversed.

It is a pretense because all decisions made would be only acting on authority of the highest levels of the company. But the culture of control is very very tight in Chinese government run entities. They are paranoid that someone at some point has done something without authority. Highly unlikely but this is about fear.

So that only leaves the possibility that their own lawyers have not done their work properly. Again, highly unlikely. Only someone who has worked in a bureaucracy would understand what a paranoid high level official is like.

Egos must be massaged and fears (especially given the debacle of Murchison Metals where a Chinese entity lost billions and did not have a controlling interest, and the debacle of deals with Palmer et al) put to rest. The Chinese are very risk averse in the washout of failed JVs in Australia. I feel for their lawyers, and I mean this sincerely.

This is a quite different scenario to that with Xstrata/Glencore where the right hand really didn't know what the left was doing and there was a battle for control.

All just going through the motions and soothing anxiety ridden high level Chinese officials who are very risk averse and don't trust their own staff to do as instructed. You get a situation like this, it's all about them being reassured of their power, and the correctness of their decisions, and that their lawyers have done as instructed without deviation. It's excruciating to be a part of such a process.

(If we aren't dealing with the Chinese, I have no explanation for the prolonged delays. On the back of these delays, in other words I think it highly probable that we are.)