Ann: Small Caps Interview - Paul Burton, page-42

Just managed to clean out the transcript on the 249D part of the interview. I may follow up with comments later on

Kerry: Could you please make a comment on this action?


Paul: yeah kerry well obviously this is a very unwarranted distraction and certainly a big interruption for us and interrupting some of our areas of work, but you know we have a very committed hard working team, so we've just been pushing on regardless

it came out of the blue and it's been brought by people with no reasons apart from wanting to get rid of me and john elkington and basically the other people on the board, to take board control you know these represent about eight percent of the company, so we've got 92 percent of shareholders that we also have to look after and TNG has high value assets and excellent prospects and handing control over to to people that represent eight percent is not in the interests of all shareholders, so we have to act as directors in the best interests of the company at all times and not just for the select few

so in our conclusion this is completely opportunistic and it's a takeover of control and that could wreck the company and certainly all the very solid hard work and status that we're in, with everything to do with the mount peake project and on our other prospects

unfortunately I would like to strongly make this comment that the way they've approached this has encouraged terrible vitriolic commentary both about me and my team and also concerningly to others outside of the company including some notable public figures such as northern territory government ministers amongst others, so i think this type of action is inciteful and it doesn't improve the situation and frankly must be an embarrassment for the individuals making this action against TNG as it's certainly not representative of all our shareholders views


Kerry:why do you think that it's come about now paul. are these people that have got experience in big projects or I think you said just before that they're coming in, they want to get rid of the board and put their own people on the board or themselves on the board. Could you just... i think it's really important for people to understand why now and you know if they get rid of you, are they well versed to take on the project, because it's quite a complex project mount peak isn't it and all of the moving parts - are they competent enough?


Paul:it's a big project and it has a lot of work moving parts as you're saying, we've got a lot of major companies working with us on this which are good relationships but to answer your question though there's no demonstrable experience in the people that they've advised they'd like to put onto the board. there's no board experience, there's no resource experience and certainly there's no listed company experience, so that's why we conclude that it's an opportunistic move and if we looked at the timing of this this comes though directly straight after the second announcement that we made on the project financeso our conclusion is that that's the reason for control of the board, controlling the company while the company's in a good position.

unfortunately what it does is it damages the company, damages things that we had planned, some things have got to be put on hold. we've got lots of people that are just sitting by the sidelines waiting we had a another potential deal on one of our other projects that fell by the wayside until the results of the 249so there are unestimated consequences already from the action that's been taken and you know we just find that it's deplorable for us to be facing this at this time when we're actually kicking some good goals


Kerry:you are kicking some goals. when you say it's opportunistic, do you think on the back of announcing funding is it... is it... do they... i don't want to put words... look I'm not sure how far i can go with this paul but would they.. if they've got no resource experience and no listed board expertise, they haven't been on boards before is what i think you've just said, so are they just there to grab the assets and clear them out... is that possibly what they're thinking of doing rather than bringing the project to fruition

Paul:one thing that's been missing in all the commentary that we've had from them is that there's there are no plans from them and what they want to do with the project, the company etc there's been really no plans so we don't know what their plans are, but you're correct i mean as i mentioned the action arose straight after the second announcement that we put out for funding, it was from euler hermes when we put that one out, and it came directly after that, which we looked at the whole scheme of things, we expected NAIF funding to occur after that as well and we also had the K-Sure one that we announced

so yeah it's opportunistic. that's the time when we're actually achieving announcements that maybe some they've been complaining about to date, so you know we're achieving good things in the company, company's ingood shape you know, got good money in the bank, got good prospects, good team. so it's opportunistic

Kerry:and i think that if i was looking at... because i've known you for quite some time paul and you have been diligently working through this and it is complex, but it's like you've now got all the ducks in a row, you're actually getting into the development stage of this and there's light at the end of the tunnel if you like, so this comes i guess is a really unwelcome distraction. When's the meeting and do you feel like you've got good shareholder support

Paul:Yeah absolutely right it's a very unwanted distraction and you know we've built the project up to this stage methodically and maintaining a very professional attitude to everybody that we work with including governments agencies, the traditional owners, all the companies that we have involved from overseas, all the people that have been been major investors with our company and all the people that we deal with respect to project finance, sothese relationships have been built up over many years and you know i would hate to see that wrecked i hate to see that gone the

meeting's on the 20th of september, unless it's withdrawn prior and yeah look we expect to have a very good support