Member Info for mrtibbles

What planet has this minister been on for the past decade to have the cheek to be calling on the mining companies to speed up!, he ought to be asking his fellow ministers to be putting boot up the ar*e of the couldn’t be asked SCC who have been procrastinating on the Law 32 since 2017 providing the judiciary with an excuse to get out of making a ruling on a court case lasting nearly a decade based on admitted false accusations of a convicted felon!

CAIRO – 12 July 2021: Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of Egypt, Tarek El Molla, witnessed the signing of 4 new contracts to search for gold and associated minerals and exploit them in 15 new sectors between the Egyptian General Authority for Mineral Resources and the Australian companies Centamin and Canada's B2 Gold, with investments exceeding $17 million.

“The minister praised the results achieved by the bidding so far, calling on the winning companies to speed up their activities in light of the momentum provided by the political leadership and the government to advance the mining sector”

Also the issue of the Diesel subsidy which has been in limbo it seems since 2012 involving USD 22 million of extra AISC despite which Cenamin has continued to abide by the profit share agreement!a) In January 2012 Chevron informed CEY DFO (Diesel Fuel Oil) would be supplied to the mine at Sukari at international prices instead of at local subsidised prices.
b) In November 2012, Chevron demanded repayment of fuel subsidies for DFO supplied from late 2009 through to January 2012, the claim is EGP403 million (approx US$22.9 million).
It seems Chevron were forced into a) and b) by EGPC who in turn were informed by the Department of the Council of State that companies operating in the gold mining sector in Egypt were not entitled to DFO subsidies.
c) In June 2012 CEY lodged an appeal against EGPC£s decision in the Administrative Courts.
d) As a practical measure has paid the full "international price" for fuel since January 2012 however no provision has been made by CEY in the company accounts for the USD 22 million.
CEY management believes that, notwithstanding an unfavourable State Commissioner’s report, the prospects of a court finding in its favour in relation to this matter remain very strong.

Hi Razor's,
You may well be right becuase although signed there are still some ponits to fanalise, or so I am led to believe.

Hi Cowicahan,
Considering the various poor professional practice that carried on under Pardey it is possibly good thing that a few of his old working allies move on with him.
I find it reassuring and understandable that Martin Horgan is bringing in professionals whom he must have some considerable confidence in.

Not to worry, it's not a bad thing to remind everyone that the City of London feels it is entitled to and indeed receives preferential treatment , even if this is an exemption from a sensible regulation to curtail excessive risk taking by trading rooms by what can only be described as unfair, unethical even corrupt trading practice's in a supposedly regulated market place.
It becomes ever more apparent why Boris, Jacob Rees Mogg and other overly privileged and excessively rich buggers in the City put so much into convincing the masses that Brexit was for their benefit, on the contrary it was seen as a way to side step the Basel 3 regulations that were going to apply across Europe and so enable the City of London and the LBMA to not only carry on running the Comex paper selling scam, but now with a clear and unfair commercial advantage over all other trading rooms and institutions that are complying with Basel 3 rules !
The City of London and our government have no desire to abide by any rules or regulation that in any way threatens their exclusive power,privilege or ability to create more wealth for those at the top!!

Hi MrBond,
Entirely agree with your observation and comment on the said member comment which was unwarranted and just rude.
Some that visit this forum from time to time are obviously used to the sniping,selfish behavior and bad attitudes that prevail on the vast majority of other forums.
To be frank I really can't see why anyone who can't be bothered to be civil, or show any interest in joining the debate and exchange views and opinions from other forum members on all manner of subjects should expect to get any information or help regarding their interest or investment in Centamin.
Possibly the member was having a bad morning and will reconsider their comment, or if not then they should consider if forum is really suited to their needs.

Keep well!

Tibbs

“Wealth is used to buy influence”
The Code of Conduct for MPs and Guide to the Rules should be updated to state that MPs should register accepted gifts and hospitality. ... MPs should never accept any payment or offers of employment to act as political or Parliamentary consultants or advisers.

I wonder if Boris & his crew were sent shortbread by the LBMA to persuade them to get the Basel 3 rules changed!
Can't help but suspect that some rather more expensive persuaders get sent to Boris and other ministers by professional lobbyist companies!

Labour MP surprised at the number unsolicited gifts she receives from professional lobbyists
https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/four-things-coventry-mp-been-17826347

obligations as an MP
As an MP, you must follow the rules relating to donations and
loans that you receive in connection with your political
activities.
As an overview, you must:
? check that donations you receive with a value of more than
£500 are from permissible sources
? check that loans you are offered with a value of more than
£500 are from permissible sources before you enter into
them
? familiarise yourself with the relevant registration thresholds
in the Guide to the Rules
? report the details of relevant donations and loans to the
Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards within 28 days
of accepting them, including those from the same source in
the same calendar year that add up to more than the
relevant thresholds
? return any impermissible donations that you receive within
30 days of receipt and report the details to the Electoral
Commission within 30 days of returning the donation
? pay back any impermissible loans immediately and report
the details to the Electoral Commission within 30 days of
ending the loan
? notify the Electoral Commission if you find you have
retained an impermissible donation or loan more than 30
days after receipt.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmcode/1076/107604.htm

Sorry terrible typo's below it posted before I intended, still I think most will understand the Prof Stanley Unwin gibberish!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpJzGeM2p4

So then according to the Fed things might get worse, or they might get better, or they might stay the same, or they might do a severe of slight wobble about before tapering off into steep divergence of corresponding and opposing movements in the same and opposite direction before entering a steep pull back or possible upsurge into a steep curve of a healthy pull back due the the market getting ahead of itself and not realising it was oversold into the down turn in the short term over the longer term causing severe confusion in the positioning of the candle sticks over the Monday morning moving average of the queue in Starbucks!
So what to do ,sell 50 trillion paper futures and turn on the dollar printing press for a bit longer in the short term over the longer term and see what happens!

Who predicted that Chri55?
You wouldn't be smoking a "Spliff" by any chance ?
Now let me see, was that a pink elephant flying over there?
Oh no!, now I have put my foot in some rocking horse poo!
Now what shall we do, consult the charts, the 10 year moving average or the tea leaves, possibly British Bulls?

Hi GJ,
No doubt Siko will post as soon as he is able to get some reliable information.
However it won't be easy for him as the need for confidentially on the details of these negotiations is being taken very seriously by all parties involved!
Unofficial or premature release of any news, especially if it weren't entirely accurate could invalidate any agreement reached and the negotiations would have to start all over again.
Patience, no news could be very good news !

Sorry typo below should read
Talks are still ongoing on this and other issues.
Things also progressing very well at Sukari !

Hi Gj,
From a conversation I had with a well informed source this week I understand talks are still ongoing on this and another of other issues.
Things also progressing very well at Sukari !
So it seems there will be a very busy run in to the Q2 numbers and then the interim results with some progress updates on Sukari and other issues in early August!
No need to be concerned about the SP pull back today, it's quite normal on a Friday, but certainly not justified as far as Centamin is concerned, as will become apparent, especially if things work out as well as intended!
The Spivs at Worldquaint will be getting their ar(se's burned unless they unload some of their shorts!

Hi Instant,
The return on Bonds are pants utter pants, they may be supposedly secure, but what on earth is the point of farting around for a return of 1.38%?
Anyone using an investment adviser or broker would never make up the cost of the consultation, trading costs and management fee's!
Life is far too short and precious to even consider bonds with a return of less than 10%!
If truth be known none of them in the City or Wall Street brokers experts really buy bond's themselves they just con others into buying them to earn themselves commissions and provide a reason to manipulate the markets.
Tell the City and Wall Street to shove their government bonds up their rear ends and then see what happens, it will certainly show just what a "Crock" most bonds are!
You could earn far more writing an article on why to invest in bond's, or not as the case may be!
My answer to any so called financial experts advocating how marvelous bonds are then they should go and invest in them instead of trying to wangle a fee out of me for such stupid advice!
The returns on premium bonds are far better without the the cost and as far as investment's go if it doesn't pay a decent dividend then don't bother!
Bonds are a way of manipulating the masses into accepting a less than derisory return for some supposed security based on debt most likely and just a way of keeping interest rate 's low!

Hi Jep,
Based on recent conversations with other better informed people than I , Barrick or Newmont have enough on their plates at their moment and I very much doubt either would stand any chance as things stand of getting Centamin on the cheap, assuming they had made any initial approach that is,which neither have as far as I know!
Bristow is used to getting his own way, that ain't gong to happen in Eygpt unless it suits!
Hopefully more will be revealed about Centamin in the near future!

It seems it's all about spending borrowed money, (i.e. not theirs) which has o be paid back, this is all well and good if the borrowed money is spent wisely and results in a profit, but what if the borrowed money is frittered away on what turns out to be poor business decisions then the company debt grows even bigger, what then, certainly no dividends!
So it seems that Centamin is wise by comparison, no debt, money in the coffers and new manegment who are intent on getting Sukari the main income generator running smoothly and consistently producing around 500,000 oz.
There appears to be a very strong determination to move away from spending many millions of dollars on hole drilling in potentially unstable ares area's of West Africa in order to hopefully make a promising discovery on which to sit for the next few year's!
Possibly then a desire to get back to the original company business model of maintaining the Sukari ATM and preserving a cash buffer, thus sustaining a very reasonable dividend and certainly not going into debt on more exploration drilling or opening mines in unfamiliar areas of potential unrest.
My own opinion is that should the negotiations of the T & C of any new and suitably located Egyptian concessions be successful then then the money to fund the development of these new resources will come from the sale of the West African assets that don't fit in with the Centamin business model.
Again it is just my own opinion, but possibly the reason it has been impossible for investors to get the promised updates on the West African assets is because the compiling of it was about as reliable as everything else Pardey was involved in!
That said then it would seem to make sense as part of the present strategic review to reevaluate accurately the present state and value of the West African assets in order to be able to get the best price for them if they are to be sold.
As to take overs there appears to be no interest on the part of the new management and certainly any bid at 30% above Centamins present value would be regarded as a silly joke!
£4.50- £5.00 might be considered as showing a real interest, that is of course assuming any would be suitor doesn't leave it too long considering Centamin's future potential!
So I shuld think there will be very busy run in to the Q2 numbers and then the interim results in early August!

Tibbs

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates headed into the boxing ring for another round on Monday, before OPEC+ called it quits on a production deal. The unresolved spat between the long-time allies saw WTI crude soar another 2% to near $77/bbl, further squeezing an already tight oil market and raising concerns over inflation. At issue is the current terms of "baselines," or the measure in which each country calculates its production cuts. The UAE feels its current level of 3.2M bpd from April 2020 is too low - and should be 3.8M bpd when the deal is extended into 2022 - but the Saudis and Russia have rejected any readjustments, fearing that other OPEC members will issue similar demands.

What's at stake? Abu Dhabi is attempting to force the group to accept its request or risk unraveling the alliance. At the extremes of the equation, crude prices could make an outsized move in either direction. Failure to reach a deal could mean crude could rise even higher, but OPEC+ unity may also break down, risking a free-for-all that could send prices crashing. That scenario played out last year when a disagreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia prompted an oil price war. Months after the dispute was settled, the UAE stirred things up again by threatening to leave the cartel.

"Failing to come to a deal may provide some brief upside to the market, with reports that output would remain unchanged," explained analysts at ING. "However, realistically it could also signal the beginning of the end for the broader deal, and so the risk that members start to increase output."

Outlook: The tensions between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are going beyond oil. While the UAE's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman once had very close relations, the former has been flexing its own geopolitical aspirations via foreign policy moves towards countries like Israel and Yemen. The Saudis have also called for foreign companies to move their regional headquarters to Riyadh (many are now in Dubai), and following the OPEC standoff, the Kingdom moved to restrict citizens' travel to the UAE

Unfortunately this is the end of the dialogue, although as Kees suggested it may possibly be that other more pressing issues have intervened and Richard has decided his time is better spent on those for now.
I make no assumptions but shall draw my own conclusions and leave everyone else to do likewise.
Whatever thank you to Mr Gnome for helping to bring about a very interesting exercise that we can all learn from.

cont-
The conversion of resources to reserves for underground mines is much more tricky than open pit mining. Isolated blocks often do not warrant the capital cost to access these and the amount of dilution is much higher than for open pit mining. Furthermore mine recovery is usually lower than for open pit mining.

In summary, the resource cut-off grade is not very representative for actually applicable in underground situations compared to open pit situations.

The 2017 presentation is discussing statistics for all commodities using the same approach as above. My comments apply therefore also there.

SUGGESTION

Your suggested exploration expenditure between approx. US$2 billion and US$10 billion per annum over the period 2000 and 2013 looks low when I place it into context of reported expenditure by major producers.

I attach a copy on an analysis I did of the financial performance of the 11 largest gold producers over the 10 year period from 2003 to 2013 covering the period of steadily increasing gold prices until the collapse in 2013. These companies accounted for approx. 1/3 of global gold production. Their investments over the period were almost US$110 billion. Granted, most of this is sustaining capital expenditure, but a substantial proportion will also be for new projects, some for acquisitions rewarding exploration companies for their success. I therefore again suggest to analyse the accuracy of your cost inputs.

You will see from my study how the large producers were very wasteful with investments requiring almost consistently more cash than generated by operations. It was so bad that shareholders had to contribute funding amounting to 7% of total revenue earned over the 10-year period. In other words, even in a good gold price environment, the industry was cash negative.

One only has to look at how few precious metal companies are currently dividend payers (and those which do, often absorbing all and more with the occasional subsequent share placement), and all the funding going to exploration companies, to realise the precious metal industry is a bottomless cash pit.

The implication is that the industry does not earn a return, let alone a real return and definitely not a return of >8%, a number generally applied to assess the economic viability of new projects. It means the consumers are getting their gold at a lower price that they should pay with investors in the mining sector subsidising consumers.

Why does the industry attract so many investors given that the industry over the long term is a terrible destructor of value? The only explanation I have is, that the participants are hopeful scoring the next “ten-bagger” something that does occur at regular intervals. The participants just do not realise in the long term they lose it on other bets, just like casino-goers.

Thank you again for all the reports and presentations.

Comments/Queries:
1) Stripping out the impact of a dropping cut-off grade seems to rely on one case study only (Shahuindo, a project for which the conversion ratio to reserves was only 43% as planned by Sulliden after which Rio Alto changed the plan to Run-of-Mine leaching, possibly improving conversion but negatively affecting metallurgical recovery). I would think it risky to hang too much on this case.
1) It is not clear to me how you can strip out the effect of a drop in cut-off grade from the numbers declared by companies for their portfolio of projects.

COMMENTARY

A) Methodology

Why do you not take the simpler route of referring to the declared mineral resources which companies declare at regular intervals and major producers (with the larger deposits) usually declare annually? You then do not have to deduce a relationship that may or may not be representative. The change in resources in a particular year are exactly as per your definition: change in ounces in all resource categories + mined in the period.

B) Industry performance with respect to discovery cost.

I think your statement that “actual discovery cost are likely to be less than half that indicated above” is very speculative and probably wrong. The cost of exploring a deposit rises exponentially over time with first expanding the number of exploration holes after the discovery hole, followed by in-fill drilling to bring these resources to a higher level of confidence WITHOUT materially adding ounces.

C) Decline in exploration productivity

It may be so that the input cost for exploration cost has risen in particular as the period considered (2000 - 2012) coincided with a gold price “super cycle” with companies increasingly less cost conscious, but I would think that another, more important factor is the increasing difficulty finding deposits. The easier and more obvious deposits have been found and companies are increasingly forced to take longer shots. As MinEx points out, this is not necessarily due to a dramatic increase in depth, but companies having to test hidden targets identified by often ambiguous geophysical anomalies.

D) Preferred Target Types.

I think you are getting on thin ice here to suggest that orogenic style deposits are the preferred type based on your analysis of grade-tonnage curves. The reasons are:

- Orogenic style deposits are usually high-grade, narrow deposits that need to be mined by underground means, in terms of mining cost at best by long-hole open stoping. Porphyry type deposits are bulk mineable usually by open pit mining.
- The cut-off grades used for resource definition usually ignore mine development and sustaining capital expenditure, whereas in the case of conceptual pits for resource estimation these are considered, and are a much lower proportion of total cash cost than for underground mining. In other words, the cut-off grade for resources for open pit mines are more represen

cont-
Comments/Queries:
1) I do not understand the reference to “on a head-grade basis” for production. What does it mean and why not using declared production?

METHODOLOGY

- Having chosen the criteria for discoveries, which put a peg in the ground, MinEx has to take account of the growth in resources after the discovery hole. It has used for this the resource history of 60 major discoveries (defined as exceeding 1 Moz {I presume ultimate size}) found in the period 1980-1996, covering a range of deposit types.

Comments/Queries:
1) Given your definition of discovery date how can you have resources as from year 0? After a discovery holes substantial additional drilling is required to be in a position to define mineral resources even at only an inferred category.
2) Figure 14 does not make sense with the independent axis being “years after discovery”, but the legend showing “year that a resource was first published”. The two time frames do not reconcile with the graph implying a resource published at discovery.
3) The diagram assumes that deposit type has no impact on growth in resources, lumping all together. This ignores the fact that for open pit mines a company attempts to define all resources up-front to facilitate optimal pit design, whereas for underground deposits this is impractical and expensive with the objective being to define enough high-confidence resources for a planning horizon of 3-5 years with sufficient indication of continuity to have confidence this portion of the deposit will be drilled out during operations. It would be interesting to draw up the same graph for orogenic deposits (mined underground) and porphyry deposits (mined by open pit).

- An algorithm has been derived which forecast the growth in resources of new discoveries over 15 years with the effect of a drop in cut-off grade over time stripped out (estimated to be responsible for half the growth in resource ounces). The results is implying that at ‘discovery date” 40% of the mineral resources proven up by year 15 from further exploration have been found.

Cont-