Since you guys ask for some news about PAN, I will pass on some...

Since you guys ask for some news about PAN, I will pass on some info that I got from all the ex-employees,

Sally Malay mine layed off about 25 staffs, the underground now only have one rooster, the mill also only have one rooster, and they are on a 2 week full on production, and one week of no productions. Second round of lay offs will start after the start of March quarter.

There is always a possiblility of the whole site being put on care and maintaince, as they lost/wasted a lot of money on Copernicus, and until now with 5 metalurgist they still cannot get the Copernicus Nickel Ore to be extracted beyond 10% of the ore body. (10% of 3% Nickel ore, you can work out the rest).

Lanfranchi layed off about 15 staff for first round, however both sites will lay off more staff as indicated by upper management to reduce cost further. Both site's employee all had to take a 12% cut in wages, lost of the health insurance and no bonuses for the 6 month period.

The announced 3C remaining of the 8c dividend for the 2008/2009 period looks like will not happen since the write down.

Cost cutting should have happend from day one, not when there are a crisis happening, from what I had been told, Salay Malay's head management team wasted too much money on irrelavent items such as 46" Sony TVs through out the camps for "displaying messages" which are still no in operations. Sticking to using a charter flights which costed around $9000 per round trip from Broome to Hall's Creek when there was a cheaper option of taking commercial flights to Kunanara.
Taking only Skywest flights which is more expensive than Qantas and Virgin simply because Skywest will refund you the credit in the event that someone missed the plane. If management was a bit smarter they could have just booked all the flights when there is a flight special which happens every 3 month from both Qantas and Virgin (Virgin uses the same Skywest plane/flight from perth to broome). As for people missing their flights, then they should have to pay for their own airfares if it was their fault.

Anyway, I can go on and on about all the wrong things, but I will stop here, again people, as I always say, do your own research, ring whom ever you need, to find out the truth about the postings made here. And based on all those infomation, decided what you will do.

Regards