Fully agree, Chillimatt.There are three separate BODs and three...

Fully agree, Chillimatt.

There are three separate BODs and three separate legal teams involved.
Calling individual BOD meetings to discuss and decide, making appointments with individual legal teams to seek clarifications, and then doing the same with all three parties involved, before finally consolidating the legal document into an acceptable draft will take time. A lot of time.

The draft agreement is already prepared some time ago and preliminarily reviewed by all parties.
Most likely, the standard clauses are in a 100+ page document that all three parties have already agreed upon.

The project partnership details/specifics are likely structured into their logical appendices or attachments that can be pulled out separately for lengthy discussions, negotiations and revisions without affecting the rest of the agreement. That's still a lot of appendices or attachments to go through.

The fees item yet to be finalised could refer to what is payable to the Japanese financiers. Might even be a code word for fees and interest chargeable.
It makes sense that SMM and MC will need to pay their share of the costs if they are going to own a share of the divested Goomgarie Hub asset that will receive the $3.1B capital expenditure funding.
Probably the allocation of % ownership is not finalised yet, still needing further discussions and negotiations.

AP did mention that the JC teams were very good to work with.
So, I'm not expecting any last minute aggression or hostility to surface to derail the last 10m dash to the finish line.