Yeah I'm not across the full exploration history of Tropicana myself either, your information is very useful though, but its interesting that you and some other posters have all drawn attention to the various versions of IGO and Anglo-American's versions of how the deposit was explored and discovered. It maybe shouldn't come as a huge surprise as it went over a space of a few years and probably the first people to make the initial target generation and database queries may not have been the same guy who sat on the rig in the discovery hole and someone else who designed the hole and another who got the assays and planned the follow up drilling etc Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan as they say. The elapsed time and possible passing on of maybe some of the senior staff might also be a factor but it will all be in the documentation and exploration reports to the government and more importantly in internal and JV memos and possibly legal documents and contracts. Will be quite the adventure in the archive rooms/old laptops and archive boxes if they can still be located.
It seemed like something happened between 2005 where IGO was claiming use of the WMC Diamond Southstar database and the 2007 Anglo American paper published where its more an implication of open file data being used. I'd bet dollars to donuts that it would be a combination of both, explorers aren't going to ignore any data that assists with targeting. But I am also wondering as to how that JV actually worked and whether
That 2007 paper is revealing, isn't it? Where do you draw the line as to when Tropicana is a discovery? The initial 1990s WMC 31ppb Au anomaly? The 2002 first pass aircore with 1m @ 2.15g/T Au and 7m @ 2.04g/T Au? Or the first diamond hole in 2005 of 13m @ 1.7g/T Au? Or as you say - the first published resource estimate after a lot more drilling? Whatever the case and however incremental the discovery process is, we can all agree that the initial WMC Diamond Database number contributed but maybe not solely contributed to set in train a series of drill programs and results that eventuated in the delineation of Tropicana - and I'm assuming here that the main orebody is within the Tropicana East exploration tenement hence the 70/30% split between Anglo and IGO. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if the orebody straddles the tenement boundary somehow. As you imply - I think this could come down to the legal definition of "directly" in the phrase:
"WMC is entitled to a 1.5% gross royalty from any discoveries directly generated from the database."(my bold) - note that word directly. Another interesting thing is that in OGO's protestations of not being liable they refer to the contested issue of the Sample Royalty, whereas most other people going into the details would be calling it a "Database royalty" - although its a database of samples anyway so maybe moot but it suggests that this definitely caught IGO by surprise. As to S32's motives, we can only guess from something as simple as a junior law graduate/intern making a name for themselves by making this rather sudden historic and rather "archival" discovery all the way through to more innocent, or more sinister motives. And I was asking myself this before I even saw the Money of Mine podcast.
For those who's eyes are glazing over with TL
R by now I just saw that the Money of Mines guys have picked this up also, and if you FF to 12:26 mins in this video you can see it explained better than I can:
Name & Shame! + When IGO thought things couldn’t get worse… | Daily Mining Show (youtube.com)All I can say is glad that I also own S32 shares because if nothing else, this shows that all the historical IP and royalty streams way back from the WMC days are possibly all tied to S32 and not to BHP, thats news to me if nothing else. imagine how pissed RRL holders would feel too, probably feeling like they stepped on an old landmine although they may only be liable for stuff post 2021 so maybe not a show stopper for them.
The more you think about it from the historic S32/BHP point of view the more this becomes a massive can of worms for BHP and for S32, because of the overlap and shared ownership of many ex-WMC assets that are now still within the BHP business, you might have heard of these little things like the Kambalda Group of Nickel Mines and a little show called Olympic Dam, and if there are any more historic land-mines or booby traps that were laid by the outgoing WMC management
before they were taken over by BHP then the BHP guys will be s%@tting themselves about any other ex-WMC legacy royalty agreements that might be out there in the wild and hoping that the lawyers who did the demerger documentation of S32 and BHP dotted all their i's and crossed their t's.
(20min delay)
