"Anyone care to take a shot at this?"

Mixed picture as far as I am concerned.

In terms of the decisions Management has taken to ramp up and improve production at Velardena, I am pretty positive. During the first 18 months they have been able to increase production and improve a lot on processing efficiencies in a very adequate manner. In spite of the late arrival of the equipment from Argentina, their production expansion plan seems reasonable and I trust they are going to meet their goals from her on.

What I didn't like at all and what in my opinion was totally unnecessary was their decision to change the calculation method of the reserves. Particularly, when you know that you are still dependent on private placements for your financing, it seems not only counter-productive to change those calculation methods, but almost suspect.

That brings me to the third point and that is the timing of placements. At the time of the merger with/buy out of ECU they brought in around $ 100 mln in cash, which at the time seemed to be a nice buffer to bring the company into sustainable production. It still boggles me how fast that money was spent. At that time they SHOULD have made sure that that there would be enough cash for at least the next two years. If not, they should have taken more out of the market at that price and at that moment. I remember that shortly after the merger only $60+ mln remained and that I wondered what had happened to the other $30 mln+ in a matter of two months. At the same time, the share price mysteriously started to go down from the $20 merger price to $5 in a suspiciously short time period and two other placements were made at $ 7.44 and $5.75, both further killing the share price due to the warrants involved. Too suspect for words.

Finally, during one of the last presentations to shareholders, Clevenger indicated that this is actually a very small company with only one small, producing mine and that, given his huge experience in Chile and that of his colleagues, this is just peanuts. This makes me think we have been overpaying a management team, that is too big (and too expensive) for this company.

In conclusion, we are having a management team, that has the engineering capacity to perform well, but has shown the worst possible attitude to defend the company against share dilution and predatory market behaviour. Strange, because they saw their former employer run into bankrupcy. Not a word of real concern about the SP towards the share holders to the point that you wonder in what world these people live. By the way, this seems to be a common disease in the sector.

For those here that think, that we shouldn't be frank in our discussions here, because it might hurt the SP, I would like to say, that the SP cannot be hurt anymore at this point in time and that openness is a good thing under any circumstances.