You touch on an interesting conundrum at the heart of the VRC...

You touch on an interesting conundrum at the heart of the VRC story Dante... The project looks fantastic; top quality product, low development costs, good mine life, NPV of $1bn+, etc. Only $40M required to prime the pump. That's chump change. You'd think people would be queuing up to fund such an attractive project, and yet here we are, rattling the tin in tiny African markets most prospective investors have never heard of...

When I first invested I thought that debt-funding was a good approach because it avoided dilution. But given the mountains that had to be moved, why not just raise a bit of equity in Australia? Or indeed debt, in Australia? People chuck money at much dodgier looking schemes every day of the week. Is there some barrier to an Australian fund raising?

But $40M is also chump change to any of Volt's prospective customers, some of whom are probably eager to actually start buying the product. Taking a loan or issuing equity to one of those organisations would seem a reasonable idea. Maybe something of this nature is the "alternative funding arrangements" that Trevor alludes to, but if so, I remain curious why quite so much time and energy has been devoted to fund-raising in Tanzania and Mauritius, when it's obviously so darn hard.

Am I missing something here?