I've been watching this Carrick story unfold for quite a few...

I've been watching this Carrick story unfold for quite a few years now, and am amazed as anyone at the roller coaster ride the share price has been on. The sudden fall in price yesterday had me scratching my head (who dumps 100K shares at below market value?) and the comments in the last post from GC got me thinking.

Does anyone here recall Carricks first big announcement about it's proven gold reserves? It was only a year or 2 after the IPO, and a few weeks later was followed by a trading halt, then an announcement that Carrick had entered into a confidentiality agreement with Placer Dome, and there has been no mention of this since.

I can't recall now, but Placer Dome were not long after either bought out by Barrick, or merged with someone else to form Barrick.

So i did a little digging on Placer Domes website to see if there was any mention of what they were talking to Carrick about. It turned out that they had previously owned the mining rights to a wide area including the land Carrick now owns, and had sold those rights cheaply with with some sort of caveat over any future gold discoveries. I read the folklore story about Frank buying the mining leases from 2 guys in a pub for 50K, now whether there was an owner in between Placer Dome & Frank i really can't say (perhaps he bought them from a couple of drunken Placer Dome directors one night, who knows) But it has always intruiged me as to why there was that confidentiality agreement in the first place.

I might be clasping at straws here, but does anyone think it's possible that the reason the proven reserves have not risen in years even after the millions spent on drilling, might have something to do with a time limit on the caveat that was part of the sale agreement? Frank's way of only releasing tid-bits of information the past few years makes me think he's not ready for the major upgrade in reserves we've all been holding our breath for. Could this be the reason? Or as GC suggested in his post, is all Frank's after is a money mine?