The proposed handle for MergeCo is Elevra .... (but you knew that).
Also surely we sort of know Ms Laurie Lefcourt seeing she is a current member - albeit a newbie - of the Sayona Board. Actually she is chair of the risk and audit committee so my guess is she would have been earning her keep since coming onboard last October. A couple of tasks that I seem to recall Lucas Dow set himself when he started with Sayona earlier last year was to lift the level of governance from the Board and also to improve the communications to the market.
I would think LD sought out LL to join the Sayona board to address that first task. Here is part of her bio:
"Laurie has an extensive background in financial, strategic and risk management, particularly in the resources, construction, and infrastructure sectors. She has held senior management and executive roles across Rio Tinto, Queensland Rail, Sinopec Oil and Gas, and Wiggins Island Coal Terminal. Laurie has been a non-executive director for the past 6 years and is a non-executive director and audit and risk committee chair for Acrow Ltd and Stanwell Corporation Limited."It looks like LL is also Brisbane based and in that relatively small mining community LD likely knew that LL was up for filling that risk and audit gap.
W, I sort of disagree with your view that the only issue with Sayona is the rubbish lithium price. As I noted above, communication with the market was rubbish until LD stepped up - today's announcement is another example of that as I am fairly positive that pre-LD Sayona would have held back on any merger news until they were forced to put out the March quarterly. And the old bachelor boys while arguably adept at running a mine and counting the pennies were also sloppy regarding governance. LD has fixed that by bringing in an experienced operator in Laurie Lefcourt.
One thing I noticed about the Piedmont picks for the Elevra board is that the 19 November announcement stated that all four were supposed to be independent, at least in the eyes of Piedmont. Seems bit of a dodgy call then that one of the nominees, Jeff Armstrong, is the current Chair of Piedmont and has been on the board since when Piedmont was created in 2021 and was also on the board of the predecessor to Piedmont and that another nominee, Jorge Beristain, has been on both the Piedmont board and the predecessor board starting in 2018. Seems a generous call to claim both of those blokes to be independent of Piedmont but hey, Americans, boundaries no longer apply...
I am also not sure I totally agree with you that "NAL is the only potential source of cashflow for
many years". Sure, the first priority of the company is to ensure it does not go broke and as far as we know the company has not yet fully stemmed the outflow of cash. So for the time being all the focus is rightly on NAL. But assuming that they accomplish that first priority task Lucas Dow has repeatedly stated that he wants the company to be positioned to be first out of the gates when the lithium cycle turns. My feeling is that he's here for a good time, not a long time.
(20min delay)