Some interpretations that could be made by reading between the...

Some interpretations that could be made by reading between the lines:

1. Undoubtedly would have been a difficult announcement to make and obviously the ASX pooping its pants today didn't help - not their fault.
2. If finance was dependent on higher silver prices and further discoveries, then that is not a good basis for a deal/finance because we know there haven't been any further exploration discoveries, and we already have tragic silver bugs informing us of every twitch in the price of silver, so that can't be any surprise to management either. The external consultants would not be throwing up last-minute surprises, and the assumptions about metal prices, capital costs and costs of mining would have been clearly flagged by the consultants as either being unrealistic or too aggressive and the preliminary work should have thrown up a few red flags that this wasn't going to stack up and would/should have been communicated to IVR management. In this process there is usually a bit of back and fouth between the consultants and the company about things such as assumptions about mining costs and metal prices/exchange rates etc and if the client (IVR) is being unrealistic about the assumptions and inputs the specialist consultants would be requesting supporting evidence or declining to participate further and even sometimes refusing the work. Even if preliminary billable work has been done.
3. I agree with you that the project isn't mothballed and is possibly a viable project with higher metal prices or say a sudden drop in open pit mining contractor prices, they have spent a lot of time and money getting this far and need to proceed with the government permitting anyway in the broadest possible manner so that permitting and approvals don't become the bottleneck if the project suddenly does become economic and/or if someone else wants to buy/finance or JV into the project. Proximity to Woomera means this definitely will not be a mainland Chinese party, thats a given.
4. I don't know what information that IVR management would have in their pockets that would support that assertion unless they are in receipt of either a game-changing event that will change the economics of Paris in the future, which the rest of the world and the industry does not yet know about, and if they are aware of this information, and its such a game changer, then I bet some shareholders would love to hear about it....
5. I can't see how anyone would be able to be confident that there will be a bankable proposition in 6 months' time, unless they own a time machine and have gone to Jun/Jul 2025 and looked at the spot silver price and then travelled back in time to today.