Ann: MCB Project Mining Permit granted by Philippine Government, page-537

It is actually not a group of locals, but NGO's, and actually not so much aimed at this project specific project, but aimed at the process at MAATE (Ecuador environmental agency). The issue is that Ecuador politics are hugely divided, and much of governing is done by decree which opens up all kinds of challenges because they may or may not be compliant to the constitution. Ecuador is a legal hot mess because of this, nothing is aligned, various levels of legislation move a completely different speeds and directions.

I am not sure Phillipines is much different, as I still fail to understand how a legal requirement of the project 60% owned by a domestic company can somehow be bifurcated from economical ownership owned by a foreign company, as CLA seems to claim. Refer also to some legal developments recently, note the summary on the last page https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2014/12/foreign-ownership-rules-in-the-philippines.pdf

There is some precedent for this regarding telco firms, however the ban on foreign control on telco's, railways and airlines got lifted by Duterte in 2022. As long it this is not waived as well for mining, then imho the only viable buyer would be one of the Phillipines conglomerates with a perhaps max. 40% stake for a (non Chinese!) offtake partner that can help with funding and mine building skills. I don't think anybody will fund a US400mm$+ mine (don't believe anything less than US20k/tonne Cu production capex for a greenfield location - and that is probably even cheap) if law is not aligned with decree's. That applies to the environmental permitting process (Ecuador), as well as ownership (Phillipines).

Not even Silvercorp appearantly - but they are happy to take a blocking minority stake as an option - thank you management