BigPic & DONTCRYFORME and others?;
Your ideas of manipulation seem to be dead on, however I would like to add an opinion of my own and specifically about ECU per following, that I repeat when feeling appropriate:

< Entitlements and warrants.
A lot of fuss is made now about CEOs of large corporations collecting entitlements which were not earned due to poor or disasterous performance of the company caused by decisions of the very CEOs.
I understand that in most cases these entitlements are bonuses based on performance or perhaps as a signing on incentive, for example sports figures.

In much the same way I see warrants.
When a PP is arranged for there is no reason to issue warrants as part of the package, imo. Warrants are a necessary evil to companies with some problems that otherwise would not be able to obtain financing or at least on favourable terms. They are an incentive to the financier of a shaky company to take the risk and collect a potential reward for doing so at a later date.

The presence of warrants gives power to your financier to control your share price ( perhaps by shorting?) due to the safety of being able to obtain cheap shares at a later date. This often results in a cap on the share price.

I can understand issuance of warrants during difficult times for a company when it is an explorer and no income to support it's operations. But how do we explain warrants in the case of healthy companies and those that do have some income through production.

Last but not least, warrants with long lead times are a recepy for disaster for the duration of that lead time. >

This is appropriate in the light that ECU issued warrants with a lead time of Five Years! That is excessive, imho. That is a large part why the price of these warrants is trading highr than they should be and why it is in the interest of holders of regular shares to sell them and trade for the warrants.

It hurts regular share holders. The financiers have got us over a barrel for those five years.

p.s. BigPic:
"Please pardon my excessive posting, but today is a critical day." Huh?
You are our reporter at large giving us 'The Big Picture' and an occasional idea of where we are going.
Never apoligize for having posted more often then You think appropriate. I think I speak for the vast majority - More energy & power to ya.

Cheers to the prospects however late in comming.