Ann: Tropicana Gold Mine Royalty Claim, page-39

"I mean I understand WMC>BHP>S32 and all that, so technically I can see how a royalty might be retained and carried through in relation to a specific license etc. But I just don’t understand how it works if Independence Gold staked vacant ground and then eventually made a discovery, even if it was in some part informed by the use of a geochemical database that was under an agreement….seems like a longshot imo, but I guess it depends on what is contained in the original Southstar-WMC agreements etc."

I agree with your conclusions here, I'm just wondering if the WMC Southstar database was sold to Independance NL as an entire package with exclusive access rights to IGO in return for the royalty payment for discoveries directly related to the database, then the Tropicana East and West ground became vacant, then Independance NL picked up this ground and erroneously thought that because the Tropicana exploration ground had become vacant that would discharge them from any royalty due to WMC, then they went out and JV'd some of the ground to Anglo and this eventually assisted in but did not solely contribute to the exploration success that eventually became the Tropicana discovery. Surely when Anglo and IGO went through the permitting stage and got a granted mining lease that would have unleashed all the lawyers to tidy up any residual historic royalties payable to other companies, before the project was financed and built? If nothing else it would have been picked up in the due diligence and legal checklist of the exploration tenure.

Or the alternative possibility is that the WMC royalty was still live and/or WMC disposed of it to Southstar and thats the reason for the eventual purchase of the private holding company Southstar by IGO? That would make logical and accounting sense to me. The other thing I keep on seeing is that Southstar at one point was 50% owned by IGO and 50% owned by Ranger Minerals (Ranger eventually ended up being owned by Perilya). I must admit I haven't had the time to do a deep dive on this but maybe the fate of the Southstar Company.

There seems to be considerable doubt and uncertainty as to whether this "Dusty Royalty" is specifically attached to the exclusive use of the WMC/Southstar database or if there are additional complicating factors with IGO picking up a lot of WMC ground and operations in their growth phase pre-Tropicana discovery. Now given the flow of staff and executives from WMC both pre-BHPtakeover and during and post the takeover I don't think its any co-incidence that some ex-WMC execs ended up as directors of Southstar who had IP access to historical WMC exploration data and these same execs ended up in IGO and that IGO signed a very peculiar royalty agreement that tied royalties to a specific database and not a geopgraphical area?

The use of the word "exclusive" in historical IGO announcements would be enough to give many IGO shareholders a queasy feeling, because implicit in the use of the word "exclusive" is a binding contractual arrangement for access to intellectual property and a binding royalty payment payable from discoveries directly related to the database.

One other possibility is that this is a geographical miscomunication argument as it seems that the 1.5% WMC Southstar database royalty applied to the Tropicana West exploration tenements (100% IGO and nothing ever found) but did not apply in the Tropicana East JV tenements (70% Anglo & 30% IGO) and the Tropicana deposit is located in what was the Tropicana East JV tenements and this royalty does not apply at all, surely that would be a matter of just going to the WA Dept of Mines and reconstructing the actual tenement numbers and boundaries around the 1997 to 2005 periods and see who owned what when.

If I had seen a binding royalty attached to a specific but vast database that covered almost one-third of WA I would be really surprised and asking the vendor (WMC) who else had access to this database, and what the implications of that royalty were once ground was dropped and became vacant, and what were the implications when that database was publically released to the government (unless WA has some weird rules where you can collate a huge database of exploration results and never disclose it to the regulator ever?).