I'm here as well @Gwaihir, from the CDV days. My own average in...

I'm here as well @Gwaihir, from the CDV days. My own average in TIE is in the neighborhood of around 35c.

As you say - a very opportunistic low-ball bid but without the "slow chess" action that we saw in CDV earlier. Without Russian involvement, and in my opinion unlikely (but not impossible) that another Chinese bidder would bid against a Chinese bid, this looks a bit different to CDV in that respect. There are similarities as well though - the shorters and the relentless crushing of the share price for example.

I agree with you that the direction that the TIE board of directors take will be key here and how willling or unwilling they are to engage, As you say - if a substantial amount of TIE board and senior management want to take a "job done" attitude and cash out/retire and/or move onto the next thing (if they are young) then the simple announcement without a convincing rejection or acceptance is simply to announce to the market and any other potential bidders that they are now open to approaches is reasonable to me. These guys may be "mine builders" and there is no shame in getting a new mining operation up and going during a pandemic and being sold cheap because the market is asleep, thats the markets problem and not anything to do with their skills as construction and developer proffesionals.

TIE holders have a few things going for them though with an improvement in operational perfomance at the mine site, probably an increasing gold price, pretty good defence advice from Barrenjoey, not a terrible jurisdiction in the Ivory Coast and but the actions of the TIE board are the key variable here.