Ann: Managing Director & CEO Change, page-41

Interim CEO seems to be a mostly financial guy but was MD at Arrow Minerals (ASX:AMD) for the past decade while it slid from $1.00 to $0.01, has also spent the past year or two as non-executive director on the boards of a couple of tiny gold explorers, one of which didn't move and one of which went up 15x after sitting at 1 cent for ages. Share price movement of companies he's involved with aren't exactly a reliable indicator of competence especially in the exploration sector though, so overall I'd say it's not as bad as it could be, given that with Arrow he would've gotten a huge amount of experience navigating Western Australian regulatory frameworks.

Of course, still very scary news seeing CEOs shuffling around while approval delays continue. Potential for huge catchup after approvals since this is stagnating/dropping while the sector jumps +10% every few days, but very much a roulette wheel. I'm holding because I only have a few thousand in Vimy.

BTW, for info, the Mining Proposal / Mine Closure Plan has been in since last November, and is currently at revision 3. I looked at a few dozen proposals at random from the last decade on the MINEDEX portal and it seems the median approval time has been roughly 6 months with huge variation; as low as 1 month, as high as 1-2 years, depending on urgency and size/novelty of the proposal. Given the boom this year they've said is slowing down approvals, and the novelty of a WA uranium mine, I'd say that (1) the delay we are seeing does not strongly imply the government plans to delay on purpose until they miss deadlines - this delay is somewhat expected and should not scare us for that reason, but (2) the delay we are seeing could well extend up to the point where they miss the deadline simply because a 12 month approval time from last November is a plausible scenario, so we should be scared of the delay for that reason. PMP approval is a nice sign though. Overall I am expecting rough weeks ahead but quietly optimistic for the end result - though my small position and reasonably low entry price gives me that luxury