I am not surprised they laughed.If you listen to the last...

I am not surprised they laughed.
If you listen to the last financial meeting the board were showed great deference to Mr, Brasil.
After all they are his board and are mainly there because he asked them to be I naturally assume.
He bought into a ballsed up company that should never have been in the position it ended up.
Get it sorted and the sky is only limited by the quality of the management and their decisions NOW.
He may also owe them for historical good service,to him in the past and be supporting a vehicle for them to excel in their own right?

Fixing cock-ups take time.
They may have looked at Darques the dog and thought what can we salvage from here right at the beginning.
Even if back then they had decided the underground equipment and crusher would best be elsewhere,they had to run The DOG mine to its natural finish to get back what they could in the way of profits.
Then tie that in with timing of operations elsewhere.

That sort of board planning is the difference between collapse and a continuing profitable business.
That is why a paved road for trucking before ore trucks even hit it for delivery,so fewer weather disruptions to trucking and to lower trucking costs as they can traverse safely a lot quicker with less truck wear and tear.
IMHO - What destroyed Arrium was a collection of mistakes.
The first was being nudged into buying a mining operation that was export orientated in the concept stage,with debt,long before it was operating, rather than allowing them to progress and install port infrastructure on Arrium's wharf.
The second was buying cheap train carriages where the wheels has inclusion making half the wagons unusable for many months at peak IO pricing.
The biggest irony being they made train wheels in house.
The next was mining and trucking to load the same train over a 7km ? dirt road that got flooded out and cost a fortune in lost sales again at another peak in IO pricing.
Meanwhile contractors including the trains were getting paid,even if they didn't run on take or pay contracts.
The lost time slots on the part of the state rail network couldn't be made up with extra runs to catch up on lost production.
By the time they paid for the road to be paved the writing was on the wall.
The last was to give $50m? worth of dividends out and 6 months later need to do a cash raising that became a shorters god send.

If the wagons hadn't crapped out,or the road had been paved,in every likelihood the company would have carried on clearing US$100 a ton to its full potential at the time both these events occurred and likely never needed to raise cash.would have met loans as they came due with CASH and never been sold for peanuts to a foreigner.

DYOR + DYODD