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The government added four more public consultation sessions, which resulted in the delay from May 29th to June 11th. We’ve seen a working draft of the Mining Law – it’s available on the ministry website, although it’s in Spanish (http://www.menergia.gov.ec/secciones... ). It shows the current law on the left and the proposed changes on the right. We don’t have an English translation available because this is only a working draft.

We’ll need to see more details on how the new law would be implemented before we can say whether we’re comfortable with it or not. These details would typically be included in a set of regulations designed to flesh out the law.

We probably won’t be resuming exploration until the new mining law is passed and we’re confident that we can work with it. The government has said they’ll pass the law by the end of August. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s the case.

As far as we can tell the new law says nothing about limiting companies to three concessions. We haven’t been notified of any changes to our concessions to date.

Best Regards,

Tim