Serves them right for not having the longer term faith in Conti...

Serves them right for not having the longer term faith in Conti that many have here.Even Hairy shows a form of faith by staying with them with his trading.

The trouble with many funds these days is that they no longer have a hold strategy.Perhaps it has something to do with how Conti has lacked that transparency in reporting to date.Hopefully thats all about to change with this Qtrly and those cash injections.

But one cannot deny there is a promising longer term story here.Its just that when you get the likes of The Good(???) Dr. espousing such exagerated analysis as he did with a production profile and hundreds of millions in revenue with a couple of years, then you are attracting investors on very poorly assessed information, espc in this economic enviroment where one has to tread a little more softly and put development/production runs on the board before going cap in hand back to the banks.

At least with SIOC/cdt on board, and their apparent commitment to their % of each project, it should just about automatically guarantee that Conti will be able to achieve such financing.But then this will rely on just how closely SIOC/cdt are going to work with Conti when developing these projects.DeWitt will be a big lipmus test in this regard as its not a cheap project.But then theres much left to define in terms of how this projects infrastructure and operations are going to pan out when there is as much unused capacity at nearby mines.

But as my mind tends to do Ive wandered a little from the O-Ziff issue.

Its a pity that when a company like Conti can atrract finance such as the ABSA package that they necessarily have to go to organisations like O-Ziff to tide them over until their projects can contribute enough revenue with decent margin.Things did turn out to be a bit more complicated with initial poor efficiencies at Ferriera and Vlak.Like some were saying here perhaps they should have come to the core investor that has supported them all along and paid upwards of 5.5c rather than going to the likes of O-Ziff and Socius.

All history now and in some respects they didnt do too badly given the state the global economy has been in in the last few years.

d.