I've been hlding a little while. Far less time and money nvested here then many, so therefore like to keep my engagement minimal, genreally non-existent.
But, having read alot of the posting here, I am a bit suprised and then again, not.
I'm not suprised as I know alot of people have been invested for quite some time with quite a lot of money at stake - so totally empathise (although I'm not one of them) with that, and what the recent announcement has meant for the concern of those people.
What I am suprised about is we seem to have forgotten where we are - Zimbabwe.
The risk of things not happening on time, or not happening at all, has always been well and truly known. So I am suprised when somethng happens completely consistent with the risk we knew - that we sought of get a fair bit out of whack.
IMO - the Zim Government is not going to let themselves, the public (via media coverage), pension funds and I suspect (just like in Australai) some very wealthy local individuals be undermined, by not getting the gazettal done. There could be so many reasons at play. For all we know the Government didn't want a farm-in to 'their' investment.....maybe they wanted to go it alone, maybe that's how confident they are also. Why would they want their investment diluted or made more complicated by another party getting involved?
All that is pure speculation.... - what's not speculaton, is that we have always known the this kind of thing that happened last week could (or arguable would) happen....and it did. So when we think about it, no real suprise...Some could argue the macro-fundamentals of what we knew are actually just playng out as we always knew they could.
I think the impact here in the end will be about time. Changing our 'farm-in' strategy to a soph raise either way was going to be dilutive. , Wether this change si by design or necessity, not sure, may find out tomorrow. But (imo) we know there was always some dlution to SH value, no matter which 'buy-in' option the company took. We assume a 'farm-in' was going to be positive, but how do we know?....we never got far enough to find out the terms.
I personally think that being pretty agile and being able to respond with a plan B so quickly, is a credit to the management. I am sure they woudl rather thngs were a bit more straightforward too. But to return to teh basic tenent here....we are in Zimbabwe. That is not a backhander, it is just by definition a different culture, a less mature mining juristiction and less mature democratic government, with less mature processes etc, etc, etc.
Looking forward to tomorrow, and fingers crossed.
Good luck everyone, more of this kind of thing to come, we suspect!
EB
