@scalper"I don't think we would be a price taker at all, I still think we are the glue that makes it all stick together"If that really is the case, and it does seem a credible point, then you would expect whoever was buying Telfer and Havieron would be trying to stitch up an agreement with Antipa beforehand, rather than leave the ownership of that piece of the puzzle open to chance.
But I am still not sure that Newmont are yet 100% set on finalising the sale of Telfer. They play their cards incredibly close to their chest, but seem annoyed and reluctant to release any more information than is utterly necessary, information that could increase the share price of Antipa.
I think they could well have Antipa in their sights, subject to the outcome of any drilling at Parklands.
Imagine:
Newmont have only $6-7M more to spend to secure a 51% JV in Wilkie / Parklands, and that expenditure might then tell them if Parklands was good enough to merit an about-face and retention of the Telfer project.
If on the other hand Parklands turned out to be just another 'GE01', and nowhere near good enough to justify retaining Telfer, they would walk, and also sell their Antipa shares, having first allowed Antipa a free hand to release all the results and get them the best price for their AZY.
If Parklands is another 'Telfer', they then have a choice:
a) Spend another $40M in the ground to earn 75% of the Wilki JV and Parklands, or
b) Hide their homework as best they legitimately can, and make the lowest ball offer they think they can get away with for all of Antipa, with it's incredibly large strategic landholding, which is most of the shallowest, lowest cost exploration acreage in the province. Antipa's current market cap being just $12M more than the $40M earn-in that would get them 75% of just the Wilki JV.
(At which point, I'm glad we have two very capable and highly incentivised mining lawyers on the Antipa board).
The other factor that may be influencing Newmont's thinking is this:
When Newcrest gave up all that regional Telfer ground in the 1990s, they probably felt that it had been pretty much worked over for another 'Telfer'. The industry paradigm back then was that Telfer itself was a 'one off' (the legendary Lassiter's Reef?) And that all of the other obvious look-alike 'Telfer Domes' had been explored and found wanting, using an exploration model that targeted geological dome structures and surface geochemistry. (I even drilled one these myself. And what a disappointment that was!)
But since that ground was given up by Newcrest, and largely acquired by Antipa, Havieron has been discovered. And Havieron is nothing like Telfer at all! It is a completely different beast: it was found not by geology and geochemistry, but by magnetics and gravity geophysics. And Antipa's massive regional ground holding certainly hasn't been comprehensively worked over for another Havieron using those techniques.
So:
a) Telfer isn't a one-off after all, and
b) the exploration model and techniques that were being used back then to look for the next big gold orebody were not necessarily appropriate.
The Antipa regional ground is wide-open for another Havieron-type discovery, and that is a very significant asset too.
The speculative imagination abhors an information vacuum!
Yawwnn..
(20min delay)