I wouldn’t have a clue if what you say is correct, but other...

If you go and check on both Shortman and Small Caps websites the total number of short sold shares is 1.22m 0.16%, the number of shares shorted only increased by approximately 200k in the last week of trading, and Shortman has a graph showing the history of the short selling, and there wasn’t any increases in shorting recently.

I wouldn’t have a clue if what you say is correct, but other than someone looking to profit short term during the exploration phase, doctoring up the grades would be very foolish, as it would come back to bite them in the end.
Cant imagine the Japanese partner falling for doctored grades, and if it was true, they wouldn’t be very happy about any of it, they can be very brutal bastards , just look into history.
If the grades were doctored, they would have had to virtually doctor every drilling result, as they have been drilling for years, and who in their right mind would 1/ dupe a 40% partner, and then proceed to borrow money, and build a complete new mine, all the time knowing that it would fail, because the ore isn’t actually there, or the grades are never going to be economical, doesn’t make any sense to me.