I have not read all of today's posts, but I do see a couple of improvements in today's PP over the last one we did in the beginning of 2009 for the mill purchase. They are as follows:

1.) This PP is being purchased buy existing key large shareholders and a few institutional investors. The last PP was done by a syndicate of underwriters led by Blackmont and TD Securities. I wonder if those key shareholders include Wister Holt?

2.) This PP was priced at $0.72/share while the last one was priced at $0.70. While this is not much of an improvement, it is the first time an ECU PP has been done at better terms than the last one going back 3 or 4 years. The short slime will finally not be able to cover at lower priced shares.

3.) This PP includes only 1/2 a warrent vs the last on which gave a full warrent.

4.) The warrents expire in 2 years vs the last PP warrents which did not expire for 5 years.

Now that ECU is in production, the stakes are higher as we have the potential to make money for the 1st time in years, and we have the potential to loose money big as I saw some of my small lead and zinc producers do when the bottom dropped out 2 years ago. GWR attended last years ECU shareholders meeting and said that the company was targeting sales of 2.4 million per month with their new mill. I think that if ECU was overly conservative that is what we would have gotten for a period of 18 months until the gold pyrite consentrates ran out. We would have made a few bucks for 18 months and then been in trouble again afterwards. Instead, ECU is aggressively building new operations for sustained and larger cash flow. These include the proposed leach tanks for the gold pyrite tailings, starting up the sulphide mining and milling operations again, and possibly the secondary treatment of the metals remaining after primary treatment in the oxide mill. To tell the truth, I think the % recoveries of gold and silver from the oxide operation have been too low so far and hopefully this will improve once they start blending higher amounts of the roasted gold pyrite concentrates and operating the secondary treatments. All this takes money to build and I am impressed with ECU's long term planning and goals. I think once all this is built and run we will have sales of over $4 million per month.

I have read some posts today that say this money will be used for exploration. Based on today's news release I disagree. The news release contains the following paragraph:

Stephen Altmann, President of ECU, stated that "This financing is fully subscribed, in large part with existing key shareholders, which is testament to the confidence of our loyal shareholders in ECU's focus to grow the company. Together with our growing mineral sales, this financing gives us the platform to enhance our existing operations and complete the transformation of ECU into a "self-funding exploration company". In this way, we will accelerate our planned exploration program to enhance and increase our mineral resources."

So it is a 2 stage process. This money will be used to build and operate a more profitable mine and mill operation faster and better than could be done with existing revenues. This will shorten the length of time before our drilling recommences.