good opportunity to top up ad, page-15

Hi Dapper

I see a couple of separate questions here.

One is the value of a role in the marketplace. As I posted earlier the role AD occupies is not cheap in the mining marketplace. Makattack points out some start up specs have sub $100k MD salaries - there is some truth in his point, occasionally you do see that but they are accounted for in the median and average salary scales. If you look at the link I posted with my earlier post you will find that an MD salary at that level is in the lowest quartile ie 75% of MD salaries are above that. In fact $100k or less is less than 25% of all salaries as the lowest quartile boundary is comfortably over $100k - up around $130k I think in Perth.

The second one is whether you think AD is delivering value for money. This can be a pretty subjective area (eg could 3 out of 4 MD's have done a better job?). Firstly it is his company, he started it and invited shareholders to join him on the journey. He also likely has enough share votes on side that are ok with where he is at that a vote would not go against him - that's a democracy of sorts.

Regarding performance MAK is not a start up, far from it even though still rated in the spec end of the market. At this point AD could technically argue he has brought MAK to the completion of 2 feasibility studies. Personally I'm sceptical about the value of the DSO DFS on Wonarah and his actions are currently undermining the value of the DFS on Sandpiper (which may be a board problem rather than him) however these are significant milestones.

Not being a shareholder of MAK, at this stage, I'm not especially fussed what AD gets paid. On principal I dislike it as much as you do when directors and senior executives don't buy shares, in fact sometimes I really hate it and have raised it in a couple of AGM's. Still buying shares on market is not a measure of performance. It's pretty challenging to get a project up and producing and can take 5-8 years. At the moment he's still within reasonable parameters for most circumstances but he has generated a lot of shareholder frustration for himself because of his earlier overly optimistic timelines. As a whole I don't think he's any worse than most of the MD's on the ASX, maybe even better than a few and his remuneration is not so high as to be alarming.

Nevertheless I would certainly encourage you and other shareholders to be proactive in holding him/the board to account. You are part owners of the company and have every right to be ringing them, asking questions where they are at, finding out details about announcements, asking why they don't buy shares etc.