Wayne Apted is the CFO for CYM. Wayne worked at Glencore/Xstrata...

Wayne Apted is the CFO for CYM. Wayne worked at Glencore/Xstrata for 12+ years from 2002-2014. Wayne was in charge of groupwide accounting policies, external audits & reporting to committee members. Wayne collated tax reports, bi-annual financial results & established the groups largest finance company with equity of US$25 billion & US$4 billion of borrowings.

As you can see Wayne has close ties to Glencore, is a very competent CFO and obviously felt the Glencore connections would assist CYM with the $50m offtake agreement. The fact that Glencore left CYM dangling would not have gone over well with Wayne or Barry. Deme & myself have previously pointed out Glencore inactivity. What caused the Glencore hesitation?

Glencore is eyeing the $5.6 billion El-Pachon project in Argentina with 400K tpa production. El Pachon deposit lies 3.6-4.2km above sea level. Difficult mining for diesel engines.

Has offered to loan $200m back into the Zambian Mopani Copper Mine after selling for $1.5B in March 2021(This mine has a potential of 225K tpa with Glencore having entire offtake)*Note the sale date and price compared to Nifty MLX sale.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/glencore-proposes-loans-ensure-production-zambias-mopani-copper-mine-letter-2022-09-23/

In May 2022, the US Department of Justice said that Glencore had admitted to corruptly conspiring to pay around $27.5m to third parties to secure "improper business advantages" in DRC, while "intending a portion of the payments to be used as bribes". In May, Glencore also admitted to paying millions in bribes to officials in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, South Sudan, Brazil and Venezuela.

Glencore owns several assets in the DRC, including the Mutanda copper-cobalt mine and a controlling stake in KCC, a large copper-cobalt project.

Glencore, has said it will pay $180m to the Democratic Republic of Congo to settle corruption claims.

The agreement covers an 11-year period from 2007 to 2018.

It is the latest in a series of corruption cases which has seen Glencore agree to pay out more than $1.6bn in fines this year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63858295

As Bayhunter rightly pointed out:
“CYM will not be mining one year after FID because there is no need to mine, There is already 8.8 mT of open pit ore stacked on the ROM and 17.1 mT of retreat ore to process before any mining needs to take place.”

A lot of talk about Nifty mining & Heap Leaching risk. This is totally illogical and a flawed argument. What is CYM Nifty risk with only 6.3 oxide leaching years ahead?

Nifty Oxides have already leached in the past by Western Mining, Straits Resources & Aditya Birla.

Then having an extra 20 years worth of open pit sulphide ores to mine underneath the oxide. People talk about the oxide risk while never ever mentioning what is below. With AUD$250m required for the oxide restart and to free run the 20 years worth of Open Pit mining of the Sulphides. Nifty already has a concentrator sitting idle if the CYM sulphide leaching proves to be uneconomical, although Finders(CYM BOD) have successfully leached sulphides at Wetar in Indonesia.