What you posted is unintentionally deceptive. The actual deal is not to pay Intrinsic that money but to incur exploration expenses on those claims and pay a certain amount of cash over time to Intrinsic. It's a jv earn in deal and if you check you'll probably find that so far only $50,000 has been paid to Intrinsic.

Here is the news release from Celtics website: http://celticminerals.com/press/14-07.pdf

*Cut me some slack guys I'm an exbanker and hate these deals where somebody promises to do something when you know up front they don't have the capacity to follow through. These deals are, for the most part, structured so the jv partner can shrug his shoulders and walk away without a second thought.

On the other hand while I put no value on the jv deals it's hard to see how they hurt Noront either. In almost all cases I see Noront getting the properties back in a year and if they don't then fine it's because to my surprise the junior actually explores the property and just maybe finds something interesting.