Exploration potential

Karouni has been made possible by Mr. O'Sullivan's assembly of numerous tenements. Must have been a nightmare to get everything after those tenements had been held in private hands for decades. If you do some research you come up with the fact that Troy generally owns 100% of tenements where only the government royalty has to be paid. But some of the most interesting tenements include special deals where there is a small additional royalty or even minority stake (10%) involved.
Currently Troy can not do any serious exploration. Only picking low hanging fruits by drilling the near mine targets. The exploration done under Martin was A$13m to get some regional understanding and thus did not give ounces or large targets besides Gold Star, which is after the near-mine targets the next logical step. On top of those possibilities there are very interesting tenements outside of the Karouni core area. Those tenements have been excluded in nearly all presentations so very good that they have been mentioned again in the latest presentation.
Getting back to the discovery of Smarts, Hicks and Larken, those discoveries are not Troy discoveries and they are the results of a very different approach. O'Sullivan drill-tested artisanal pits and came up with those 3 discoveries. Well, Smarts artisanal pit was not the largest one. The largest pit is Whitehall, apparently artisanal miners have taken out 70k ounces over the years which is very good for artisanal mining.
The latest published data we get on the Whitehall tenements are from the 2014 technical report. In general Whitehall = Kaburi = Harding tenements where Troy ultimately can get a 90% interest (p28 from the 09/09/2014 report). On p32 you will find the terms of the Kanuri agreement. It is a 4 step plan to get up to 90%. At date of publishing only step 1 had been fulfilled with step 2 having been nearly fulfilled. So I assumed that step 2 went ahead too, ownership 50%. To get to 90% by fulfilling steps 3 and 4 Troy had to spend additional money via expenditure on the property. Step 3 is US$2.4m to get to 60%. Step 4 is US$1.7m for each additional 10% increase. So overall 2.4 + 3x1.7 = US$7.5m or A$10m. Depending on what exactly is done at Whitehall those costs could have been prohibitive currently. I have contacted the Chairman about that issue and apparently the ownership on those tenements seems to be at 90% already. They must have done a lot of work there before hard times came upon the company from 2016 on. I would have guessed they had avoided those costs given the circumstances.
Good to know behind the scenes things are looking much brighter than one would deduce based on the old reports and circumstances over the last years.
It also means besides the near-mine targets, Gold Star and regional targets Troy still has the fourth exploration option: Just drill at existing artisanal pits. The largest one is still there.