To any of you out there who are seriously trying to work out...

To any of you out there who are seriously trying to work out whether MHL is a good punt (this excludes J123 who is doggedly avoiding all the serious and obvious shortcomings of MHL) please consider the following:

1. the technical brains at MHL is Jon Roestenburg but Jon inherited all the licences they currently own in KR so he had no input into the decisions to acquire them. I have heard that some of the moose pasture he inherited included a tenement with no sediments in it and of course their famous licences over Lake Issyk Kul. The Lake IK licences were supposed to be like the success stories over lakes in east Africa but the technical gurus at MHL didn't pick the difference between a rift system and a mountain system (darn why didn't those dense ancient tropical forests grow in between these high altitude mountains). This better explains the efforts to farm Kyrgy out since Jon came in and the small efforts on exploration and why the farm outs haven't survived much longer than it takes to have a good look in-country.

2. the guy who does the scouting for new projects (what else is he there for, I understand he has a biology degree and no genuine mining/exploration experience) is Mark Gwynne. You can check his track record by going over the history of Jackson and MHL, the companies he has been a director of (he was also a director Leopard but cant find any info, but would guess same or worse). A whole resources boom has passed those companies by with nothing to show for it. The one time it looked exciting was in the lead up to the Medina JV announcement for MHL, but hell, what happened, Mr Gwynne sold a significant portion of his holding leading up to the announcement. I held some at the time and thought to myself 'if I was him and this was a good announcement I would be waiting for a better price after the announcement'. There was enough writing on the wall for me and I sold. Thank God I did. Rumour has it he explained it at the AGM by saying he had to pay for his house. Can anyone here confirm that? Never saw that bit in the Corporations Act. Final point on this, how are MHL allowed to reorder their announcements for November 07 on their website to make it look like the JV announcement came before Gwynne sold?

MHL does have a heavy cash burn and that is hard to explain but an obvious negative. Other Kyrgy companies I have looked at have low licence copmmitments, maybe it is different for oil. Does anybody know how many staff they have over there? It can't all be flights? Really looks like $1.2mill is not going to go far.

If Jon gets rid of Gwynne and gets a new team in and injects new capital I might punt this. That is their only hope but unfortunately so far he is just demonstrating that he needs Gwynne and that is a bad sign for this company.

On the other hand if Gwynne is gone how will we know if an upcoming announcement is good or bad without his change of shareholding announcement to tell us?