The latest Investing Matters Podcast with Jean Roche, Co-Manager of Schroder UK Mid Cap Investment Trust has just been released. Listen here.
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worthwhile read. Thanks
‘A case study for junior miners’
Sangha bristled at BHP and Newcrest’s criticism of last week’s deal with Osisko Gold Royalties, which will see SolGold get $US50 million immediately in exchange for 0.6 per cent of all future revenues from the Cascabel tenement.
“For six years the biggest liability on SolGold has been Newcrest and BHP. They’ve talked down the asset,” Sangha told The Australian Financial Review. “This is a case study for junior miners as to why you wouldn’t want these guys involved in your project.”
Sangha helped to arrange the Osisko royalty deal under Maxit’s new role as a financial adviser to SolGold. Maxit was appointed to that role on October 7 when SolGold announced plans to merge with the company that owns 15 per cent of the Cascabel discovery; Cornerstone Capital Resources.
Sangha is a major shareholder in Cornerstone and a small shareholder in SolGold; he will control just under 5 per cent of SolGold if the merger goes through, which is likely.
Sangha is close to Osisko president Sandeep Singh; the pair were investment bankers together at big Canadian firms and co-founded Maxit together in 2013.
To avoid confusion between Singh and the Newcrest chief executive Sandeep Biswas, Sangha pointedly refers to the Osisko boss as “smart Sandeep”.
Those sorts of sledges are all part of the Sangha experience; he has declined to be in a photograph for The Australian Financial Review on more than one occasion. But despite his reluctance, he assured this publication he was better looking than Biswas, BHP boss Mike Henry and Newcrest chairman Peter Tomsett.
Wrongfooting the mining giants
Osisko was a good client of Sangha’s long before Singh took the reins in 2020; a previous incarnation of Osisko gifted Sangha that famous baseball bat.
The bat bears the label “stupidity reset device” in honour of Sangha’s work in outfoxing the much larger multinational GoldCorp when it made multiple hostile moves on Osisko between 2009 and 2014.
When Sangha helped thwart GoldCorp’s hostile takeover by arranging for most of Osisko’s assets to be sold at a higher price to Agnico Eagle and Yamana Gold in 2014, it was not the last time he took delight in wrongfooting a mining giant.
Sangha was in Forrest’s corner last year when Australia’s second-richest man launched a six-month bidding war against BHP for control of Canadian critical minerals explorer Noront.
Cont….
The baseball bat in Bob Sangha’s Toronto office is a monument to his favourite pastime of “taking down” big mining companies in acquisition battles, and he’s itching to take a swing at BHP and Newcrest.
“They are about to enter a scrap with guys like me, and BHP and Newcrest’s rumble in the Ecuadorian jungle,” says Sangha about the fight for control of turbulent copper explorer SolGold.
Recent events have entrenched Sangha’s private firm Maxit Capital as a pivotal player in the future of SolGold, the explorer that lured Australia’s most powerful mining names into the jungles of Ecuador in 2016 in the hope they would find a big new copper province.
They have found plenty of copper there, but they’ve also found plenty of the governance concerns, boardroom brawls and fast-shifting allegiances that make junior mining fun for retail punters and infuriating for big corporates with reputations to keep.
Now, after six years of internecine squabbles, a recent merger and leadership coup at SolGold has left BHP and Newcrest beholden to a colourful crew of junior mining street fighters, who might be about to sell SolGold’s prized asset from right under the noses of the big Australian miners.
‘The SolGold rush’
Newcrest was the early mover on SolGold, acquiring just over 10 per cent of the company in October 2016 after outbidding BHP.
BHP circled back in 2018 and took a slightly larger bite, giving it bragging rights as SolGold’s biggest shareholder with 11 per cent at the time and now just over 13 per cent.
Other big players joined “the SolGold rush” in different ways; Gina Rinehart’s private companies snapped up tenements surrounding SolGold’s Cascabel discovery, Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group ramped up Ecuadorian exploration, while Chile’s state-owned copper giant Codelco also claimed ground in the jungle surrounding Cascabel.
But rather than engage in the sort of bidding war that seemed likely six years ago, BHP and Newcrest have come to sound more like a frustrated unity ticket when they speak about SolGold.
Last week. they were again expressing disappointment that pre-revenue SolGold had raised funds through “high cost” forms of debt such as royalties rather than conducting the sort of share issuance that would advantage cashed-up firms like BHP and Newcrest at the expense of smaller investors who may struggle to afford to participate.
No one disputes that SolGold needed the cash; the pre-revenue company burnt through more than $US14 million ($20.7 million) in the three months to September 30 and had less than $US12 million remaining on that date. But SolGold’s choice of funding was the issue.
Cont ….
Any chance of the full article?
Jerry ,thanks for passing on info
For those who might be interested in the above, there is a podcast/Twitter feed on The Midweek Takeaway/Sunday Roast just out. At about 43mins Colin Bird (not everyone’s cup of tea admittedly) talks about the copper market with respect to juniors and mid ranking miners. He is forecasting a significant rise in prices but more importantly rise in junior miners/explorers next year.
lol Tesla , it's the headline that makes me laugh. Nothing actually happened!
Yawn ……yawn
Agreed …. But I think by using ENSA it covers 100% of those with an interest in Cascabel rather than 85%
Won’t be an issue for much longer… hopefully
DBW - nice tweet. I might be a little ultra sensitive ti stuff of late but thought that tweet was putting ENSA ahead of SOLG. A defining moment perhaps? Subsidiary yes... but surely SOLG would have sufficed.
Time to get the locals to understand that ENSA is actually SOLG and not a new company? Mmmm!
So my conclusion is that the market is being held down until this order is complete and I expect once it is out of the way the price will fly (macro factors excepted...)
That was the exact size and price I was quoted...
Red you said someone was happy to take a million off you earlier …. See the late trade and the price
Definitely typo there apols
Oh yes 1 million buy again something Dec to happening here ,can't be long of some news imho
Fort there’s the 1m
Everyone knows these are automatic trades, so every sell has a buyer.
Nothing to do with holding the price down or anything like that.
People on here commented about five million traded. That's about half the minimum we require on a daily basis.
We have low volume, it's nothing else.
You would think some on here have never brought stocks and shares before.
At least the farmers like us
https://twitter.com/solgold_plc/status/1592921293845762048?s=46&t=3OdF84YGtSpnVuITYmJEcg
Its the Autobots...
67 out of the last 71 trades...
Nobody's selling
Nobody's buying
We're all just waiting for sometyhing to happen...
I am beginning to wonder if the MM teams are so busy giving RK1 and his wife "firm" quotes all day that they have not had time to increase the Ask...?
Skint
Maybe less than that Colonel, judging by the steady 200k/300k bids all day day after day for a week or so.
I know the copper price is down but bit of a nothing day considering the palpable underlying sttength yesterday and first thing today...
Ho hum...
Calm before the storm...
Stake sale
Merger complete
PFS
Porvenir PEA
Takeover bid
Counterbid
Auction
Deliverance...
Fort, it doesn't make sense that we are where we are with the very likely bid in the headlights. Someone is still keeping this down.
I hinted a while ago that blackrock might want to rebalance (I'm being polite) the instrument they put in play that resulted in 25million SOLG shares being sold or loaned out ahead of what they thought was going to be an equity raise. Volume kicked in on the book the moment the royalty deal was announced so I reckon they are doing a fine job at keeping this in a range sub 20p while they tidy up. If buyers were really to get stuck in then they would have a challenge on their hands... instead it's a stroll in the park for them. Just speculating of course... still waiting on the TR1 for confirmation.
Another 1 million block after hours would total 4 in 4 days I believe. So looks like they are not hanging about. 20m to go?
Hahaha...I think thats a shared wish...