Im not a current holder - but I first posted here on this stock...

Im not a current holder - but I first posted here on this stock in 2012! So I’ve been a holder on and off over the years and remain very interested in how it plays out, and particularly in some of the comments made by the company lately. People are talking about facts and how confident they are with the new management and board - but apart from re-releasing or confirming exploration results from 2013 (Eliseo, Tinteiro cobalt & CuCa, Cascavel panel sampling) there only seems to have been two pieces of new information released this year and that was done so just before a CR and doesn’t seem to actually be standing up to the test of time:


1. On 25 Jan : A third hammer mill is currently on site and being installed……..and 1 tonne of waste rock returns 15.4g/t (they dont say if this was an assay from a lab or if they recovered 15g of gold from the plant or maybe 13g of gold on the table and assayed the tailings that had 2gs making a head grade of 15g/t? really not the standard of reporting that an ASX company should be allowed to come up with, but thats a different story.) They say this sample may be unrepresentative - well was it? Or wasn’t it? Although they warn readers not to extrapolate, they say that this does explain why orinoco had such problems in the past, so really they are saying that in the past ore went to waste and that we should extrapolate. They said they would go back to that stockpile as they warm up hammer mill three on 31 January….but I guess cause we didn’t hear anything more about it at any time over the last 6 months that we should assume that there weren’t grades of 15gt in the waste? So does this also mean that this doesn’t explain the problems of the past? Was this information actually correct and can they verify this information that they provided to the market just before a CR? Or did they get it wrong?

2. On 31 Jan: 5 ‘random’ samples of Tailings grading +9g/t (a number totally at odds with previously released, third party assays that say that the tailings grade closer to 1g/t). 1,000t was to be processed (this was back in January). What happened? Assay lab on site since Feb, I guess the mills and lab have been too busy processing other samples to get to the high grade tailings.

The drill hole at Xupe which they announced sounds very much to me as though they may have twinned an old Troy hole from 2008 anyway ("Historical drilling results revealed a thick shallow intersection of 44m grading 1.48g/t gold, with a 23m interval grading 2.4g/t gold and a smaller interval of 6m grading 4.48g/t gold.” that was said in a ********* .com .au article in march this year )


Geological model release: didn’t really say anything that wasn’t told to us in 2016. Paraphrasing 2016 qtlys : In the north there is a predominance of low grade shoots whereas in the south there is a predominance of high grade shoots, more mine development needed in south to access more ore, the north isn’t economically viable by itself” etc etc.


What doesn’t stack up in my view is this: if you have high grade gold at surface (in waste or tailings) process it. Sell some gold, pay the debt, pay for exploration - whatever, just make some money. Even if the plant is only recovering 50-60% of the gold so what ? Re-process the tails again later. Even if they had some hammer mills operating since Jan 31 (as they say the did) at only 30% availability over that time they should have processed a lot of dirt! If not, why not? No economically sensible reason not to. Oh, unless of course the tailings actually grade as the independent assays said that they do : about 1%. But then that won’t matter cause they have the high grade waste to process. Oh, unless thats not actually high grade either. If they made a mistake on the tailings and the waste assays then they need to have done the necessary mine development that was spoken about in 2016. Hows that going? Lots of focus on the plant, not so much on the mine, which like I said has to be the key cause even if you get only 50% recoveries from the plant that won’t matter if you are putting high grade gold through it …. But If you dont have the high grade gold to put through it…..