Ann: Galan Signs Pivotal Commercial Agreement with Catamarca Govt, page-186

I think it's pretty simple. Glencore's goal was to get access to the product via the binding offtake, so they could make their margins trading the product, as per their normal business model. They likely achieved this because of an absence of other formal offers, given the product wasn't licensed for export. This limited the target market to either a) Galan's Argentine competitors - like Arcadium or POSCO - or someone who could organise to get it refined in-country and then export themselves (Glencore or maybe Trafigura). I can understand why direct lithium competitors weren't interested in offering any debt/prepayment funding given they have their own project capex to attend to. So this effectively left only a party like Glencore. Unfortunately it looks like Glencore played Galan very well - lock up a binding offtake with only the 'offer' of helping to organise finance. In the recent interview video others have posted, right at the end JP confirms they are locked in for offtake with Glencore for phase 1. So to answer your second question, if Glencore can't/won't facilitate the funding from here (which they are not obliged to do), that will leave Galan having to look for another phase 1 funding partner, but to whom they won't be able to offer any offtake. This probably comes with a higher interest rate given that's all the financier would be getting (along with security over the assets). In my mind this really now just leaves standalone mining lenders like Taurus or Sprott, unless they can magic up a JV - but that would meaning giving a lot of the project away to someone with the money to build it. Outside of that, they'll have to rely on the equity markets as most of the other lithium juniors have had to do.