They'll be buying on market now at 56 to 58 cents. If they can...

They'll be buying on market now at 56 to 58 cents. If they can pick up volumes of 10 million a day over 3 months, that's an additional 600 million shares hoovered up for the quarter. They'll have their Chinese algorithms running, they've probably got about 6 or 7 of them running, working in tandem of price manipulation and accumulation.

Final bids may (should?) be based on market cap, 170k ozpa at AISC of US$985 for an operation that has all the bugs ironed out and is then running smoothly, should command a market cap of around $1 billion. If you extrapolate that into today's closing price, you get a price of roughly between 88c to 92c, let's round it off and say 90 cents is current fair value, as a (very) rough estimate.

The really disappointing aspect though, is if those figures hold, and they are producing that much gold at that AISC, then they become a cash cow, and in a relatively short time will have a war chest, which they could opt to give back to shareholders as a significant one-off special dividend. This would be worth waiting for, depending on how significant the return might be.

The question now is, do the majority of board members, and senior managers and executives, want to go all-in here for the long term and work the mine, or do they want to move on to other pastures? What are their most lucrative personal incentives - to stay or sell?

I expect the independent assessment will come back saying the bid is reasonable but not fair, and they'll give their reasons for that, saying it's reasonable because of the recent (manipulated - my words) beaten down share price, but not fair given the improving production profile. Then what will the board recommend?

The bid is certainly opportunistic in it's timing, no-one should doubt that.

Gw