My preference would be that they hand the whole operation off to another company that has a track record of operating profitably in Mali.
Part of the problem seems to be that a bunch of white dudes running the company from the comfort of Australia has lost track of the on-the-ground realities. It's the only way I can explain the discrepancy between what we were being told a few weeks ago and now, via media leaks.
And although bad manners and insults are never appropriate, maybe the man who stood up at the AGM and questioned the board about labour costs in Mali was more connected to the realities on the ground than the rest of them.
And finally, just to finish off this rant, many of us were calling for some sort of announcement from the first week of trading post-demerger, whilst also pointing out how strange it was that there were no announcements. I was even willing to entertain the idea it was all part of some brilliant short-squeeze plan.
In short, we were calling for some sort of announcement just to anchor expectations. If the production problems were coming to the surface a few weeks ago and a CR was on the cards, they should have called a trading halt then and got their ducks in a row closer to 30 cents, not now after the damage has already been done. Or just released the information and let the market digest the new reality for Morilla. Instead, they created the perfect environment for a short attack in which the only information was coming from dodgy online news articles and rumours on HC. And in the absence of real information, peoples' imaginations, of course, run wild.
The world is messy, and sometimes investment plans don't pan out , especially when digging gold from the ground in Mali. I can live with that. And maybe the reports in the newspaper will turn out to be incorrect. Or maybe next week, we will get an announcement showing that things are nowhere near as bad as they seem, for example, that only a modest capital raising of,say, $20 million is needed to get us through to ramped up production.
But gee, the corporate side of things (which is the responsibility of the overpaid white dudes not living in Mali) really couldn't have been handled any worse. And if nothing else, the ASX and ASIC should be asking them some hard questions about whether they have met their continuous disclosure obligations and done enough to prevent insider trading. Those graphs showing short-sales increasing day-after-day raise some very interesting questions.
And we are still waiting for some sort of update. And, in the meantime, they've effectively locked away our money while they decide how much they will dilute us to keep the wages flowing (again, assuming the rumours of a CR are true).
What a mess.
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