phone call to bevan tarratt

Well I bit the bullet late yesterday Qld time and emailed executive chairman Bevan Tarratt. I didn’t expect to get an answer, but I did, quite quickly in fact. He said “Hi KookE*, I will give you an update if you have time, call me at the office when it suits you. Bevan”

So I did.

Let me start by telling you I don’t have any groundbreaking news for my fellow ZYLots. I don’t know any more than the market has been told. However, I came away from the phone call completely confident we’re in good hands and all is well at ZYL.

There was no BS, no telling me what I wanted to hear, just straight answers. With a former life as a journo I like to think I have a pretty good radar for BS and I didn’t get any from him. I was actually surprised by the lack of it to be honest.

I obviously primed him for as much info as I could, but he was a statesman. I came straight out and asked about the halt for the resource update and asked whether there was bad news. To be honest I feel like a dill for asking that now, I mean, why would there be bad news? Why did I lead with that? Anyways…. he said there was no bad news. I pinned him for more info but he was not forthcoming other than to reiterate there would be ongoing updates to resource as they did more drilling etc and basically there were no issues and everything was on track.

I can only take that as a good thing and my bet is that Tuesday’s ann will be somewhere on the good side of the ledger, not the bad.

With regards to Mbila production he said everything is still on track, BFS is still due by end of this quarter. He said debt funding was a long process and they’d just keep plugging away at it, but it will take as long as it takes type thing. He was certainly upbeat about the response and the parties involved so, again, no reason to think anything is awry there. They are even starting the tender process for mine construction by Q4 this year as per the milestones already announced.

I thought I’d warmed up the frypan enough so I just asked him straight out about finance for the Mbila asset. Of course he said “I can’t tell you that” but when I responded “Hey, I had to try” I got a good laugh. I hope this doesn’t step on his toes but he did say something alone on the lines of “I think you’ll be happy with what we do”. I don’t even really know what that means to be honest, it was more of a re-assurance than anything, but I had the utmost confidence he was genuine. I tried again for more info but it was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to get any.

I asked Bevan what the catalysts for newsflow from here were (a bit of a daft question really considering we’d just been through them) and he just said they were always aware of continuous disclosure, but made it quite clear their job was to get these projects up and running, not putting press releases out to the market every three days to say what had already been said. He said even the recent roadshows had taken precious time from their main tasks, especially for the South African-based guys. This isn’t his words, but essentially they wants a singular focus on the projects, everything else is peripheral. On one hand my emotional self knows that will means periods of not hearing much, but the businessman in me says that’s exactly what I should be hearing. “Don’t talk about it, do it!”

After a bit of chat about the overall market resembling a toilet in a kebab shop, I thanked Bevan for his time and he made it very clear if ever I had any questions not to hesitate to call the office in future.

Anyone with questions should do the same as he is very approachable and IMO a straight shooter running what I hope will be a ball-tearer of a coal company.

*Name may have been changed to protect the author’s identity :-)