In regards 9 there was a section about this question in the
THE PLUNDER ROUTE TO PANAMA How African oligarchs steal from their countries (
https://www.zammagazine.com/images/pdf/documents/African_Oligarchs.pdf p.11)
“But they are prospecting licenses only,” emphasises provincial mining director Ramiro Nguiraz. “They are not allowed to start producing rubies, much less export or sell them.” In the case of Mustang, however, producing and prospecting seem to have started even without such a production license, called DUAT. According to an article in Mining Weekly (5) “Mustang Resources announced in late January that it had dispatched its first commercial parcel of the precious stones from its project in (Mozambique) to the US,” the article said, adding that “the parcel contained 6 221 carat of rubies, of which 75 carat was accounted for by five “special stones” (in the company’s words), including two rare 24 carat rubies, “none of which require treatment”.
A good ruby can be sold for up to US$ 100 000 per carat. Informed about this, mining director Nguiraz says he has “dispatched an inspection team” to the Mustang concession in Montepuez. “We think there are a few things they did against the law.”
Mustang managing director Christiaan Jordaan is adamant that the company’s exploration and prospecting license allows the right to export and sell rubies ‘to finance further exploration.’ He adds that “all Mustang’s exports have been approved by the Department of Minerals and the Department of Customs” and that “regarding the export of rubies from Mozambique, including the parcel mentioned by you that was exported at the start of this year, (…) we have gone through all the official channels with the Mining Department to secure the necessary export permits and we paid the royalties as calculated by the department.” Nguiraz, when asked to comment, however, stands his ground. He agrees that rubies can be exported for analysis on the basis of a prospecting license, but repeats that the license currently held by Mustang does not allow for any ruby sales. Christiaan Jordaan does not respond to an email in which we ask him to provide the text of the license.
Yes with 10 I was simplifying it a bit, but MUS still need to come up with a lot of money to start mining.
In regards 11 if you wanted to create as much chaos and damage to the companies reputation as possible (thus making it difficult for new management to do a later CR allowing it find the money to keep the ruby leases), then leaking this information and failing to ensure a trading halt was implemented you would be hard pressed to do better. Taken in isolation it is possible the leakers got lucky and guessed the right number, but in the context of what occurred it starts to look like a pattern.
The leaked story should have been grounds for MUS to cancel the auction altogether. They could have claimed the article proved their was collusion between the buyers and they could have called off the auction on the Sunday. It would have been less damaging to the SP to have sold nothing than to have only sold US$500K.
Unless CJ was unaware that MUS owned predominantly pink sapphire (and worse) the decision to even hold the auction looks inexplicable. CJ had the perfect excuse to call off the auction once Gemfields moved theirs to the week after. If I was CJ and had managed to talk myself into a jam, I would have taken Gemfields move as a lifeline, cancelled the auction, done a small CR to keep the company ticking over until mid next year, and spent the extra time looking around like crazy for the good rubies, or found enough pink sapphire to hold a successful sapphire auction.