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Here's a nice little snippet on junior miner financing from March, in the Canadian financial press: "Debt markets have been often off-limits for junior companies because banks are reluctant to agree to long-term repayment deals when a project is risky. However, amid increasingly optimistic outlook from a growing number of commodity experts, the public equity markets are poised to ramp up lending as they come off the fastest rate of financing for mining projects in four years." You can read the whole article here: http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/mining/financing-prospects-for-junior-miners-brighten-as-big-banks-search-for-next-little-star

The annual report might clear up some of your transparency concerns, or it might not. Personally I don't think I'd use the £1bn financing of a project with a 4-5 year lead time to production as my benchmark for SGZ, but each to their own.

This isn't complicated or contentious. Planning: when I was at the gold pour event at the mine in August last year, one of the Park planners was there who told me his primary reason for attending was to understand more about the proposed dry stack tailings system. So it was already being discussed more than a year ago. Clearly there have been extensive pre-planning discussions around that, which is the major change to the previous planning application. It's therefore highly unlikely that Scotgold have submitted an application which they aren't confident will be well received by the planners. Gordon Watson knows the project intimately as the head of planning during the previous 2010 and 2011 planning applications. Of course nothing is certain and planning committees can, and do, reject the recommendations of officers. But it would be very surprising if the planners didn't recommend approval given the lower-impact scheme that is proposed, and the extent of pre-application consultation on that scheme. Fundraising: a fundraising is what the past 6 years of graft have been leading towards. It's what we all want to see. For anyone to imply that achieving project finance for Cononish would be somehow a *bad thing* is hilarious. It's equally hilarious to suggest that if we do, that means anyone who's been making dire predictions of fundraisings for month after month has somehow been *proved right* because that's what they meant all along. It's 2 years since the last rights issue. That's a mining minnow in pre-production avoiding tapping shareholders for 2 years in very challenging circumstances, which I think is rather impressive. Yes there have been a couple of placings/dilution and the £1m NLR loan along the way, but it could have been a whole lot worse. If project finance is forthcoming, nobody knows whether there'll be *heavy* dilution or not. There's likely to be *some* dilution, but there could very well be a significant debt element to the funding mix. We don't know. In the meantime the likelihood of *some* dilution, and the lack of certainty that project finance will be achieved at all, seem to me to be fully priced in. So, we wait. We can argue while we wait if we choose, but I'm not sure at this point there's much to argue about. Presumably we'll get an annual report soon (last year's was out on 15/9) though whether it'll include anything particularly exciting is another matter.

Which is precisely why the expertise and intellectual property which Scotgold has acquired during the process of getting a mine permitted in a national park, is valuable and exportable. If you want to do high-grade, small-scale, low impact mining in an environmentally sensitive area, then these are the people who have lived it and know how to get it done.

Troajan - 'hindsight or forward thinking'? Mostly neither, just reality and market sentiment. It wasn't SGZ's choice that the RMB deal fell apart in 2013, and if it had gone through we would probably have gone into production some time in the 2nd half of 2014. 2014/15 might have been a bit sticky but even at the low of £700/oz we would still have been cash positive, and by now we'd be coining it. The forward thinking came in not panicking and accepting the deal that was on offer in late 2015, which under the circumstances was fairly brave, and was likely only possible because of NLR's strong backing and long-term commitment. Richard Gray said at the time they were long-term bullish on gold so didn't want to do a deal on any terms, and here we are now, looking for less than half the money, with gold at over £1000/oz again. I've always been convinced that was the right strategy, despite the short/mid-term shareholder pain we've had to endure. Whether it's ultimately successful we'll find out soon enough.

Yayay, there certainly is light at the end of this admittedly very long, winding and frustrating tunnel. The revised planning application is in and we need £8.5m to get going, £10m less than the last time finance was being sought. The inexorable grinding lower of the SP reflects a gradual loss of interest and confidence in the market that this project will ever get out of the starting blocks. That's understandable TBH. But those of us who have followed the twists and turns know why it's taken so long and know the progress that has been made over the past few years in reducing risk, massively reducing upfront capex, investigating production routes and establishing commercial partnerships. All of that has taken time. A lot of time. But it's all been a means to an end, the end being to give Cononish the best possible chance of being funded. We will know by the end of this year whether that strategy has been successful, and if you have an average of under 1p then you will do fine if the funding comes through. If it doesn't then of course we're all in the brown stuff. It's as simple as that now.

You can enjoy a peek inside Scotgold's throbbing corporate nerve centre here: http://www.realcommercial.com.au/property-offices-wa-nedlands-502081290 They should keep the furnishings as they are - there's a nice kitchen to cook up the thin gruel of 2017's newsflow, and a massage table to ease away those worries about losing all your money. Will we see a happy ending before the year is out?

Hi Rock Not cost-free to reincorporate in the UK and right now isn't the time to be incurring non-essential costs. I'm sure that's the longer term aim through and in the event of Cononish getting off and running, I'd expect that to happen within the next couple of years. Best Eck

Added to the 2 micro trades yesterday. Maybe post-consolidation tidy-up? As a side note, it's been 3 weeks since we saw a sell over £1k, and yet here we are at 38.5p in new money. Hm. Let's hope September will produce news of some description.

'But fund-raising is surely around the corner.' Well yes, let's hope so.

Hi Rockhead, I don't really understand the liquidity point but happy to have it explained. I can see the marketability point. 'The financing options now available' is an interesting phrase isn't it? Is that a general comment on the various financing routes/combinations, or is it a specific comment about actual offers on the table? Unclear. The company has seemed remarkably unconcerned about supporting the share price over the past six months or so. A pessimist might conclude that's because the management is inept. An optimist might conclude that a debt-heavy financing route is the preferred option, and that the timing of that might precede the options expiry. Who knows? Not me.

That certainly is a question, Gary. The only rabbit that's going to do that is a project finance-shaped rabbit.

Hi yayay, I'm taking a fairly neutral view. I think it's largely cosmetic, but I can see how potentially it might reduce volatility. I think it's one - not particularly significant - element of the ongoing putting of the corporate house in order.

If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true? Doris Day and Captain Sensible there. I had a dream that one day the decimal point in Scotgold's SP would move, and now it has. Yay!

At £1007/oz.

I'm more interested in the fact that the Cononish vein structure is 'open to the the west and at depth'. That and the increased intensity of your campaign which always precedes any significant Scotgold newsflow, which I tend to find encouraging.

Is a room in which you do boolin called a booler room? Asking for a friend.

For you, cannae. Back to the 'boolin'.

Canny?