The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
The original lending facility of $100,000 provides for a repayment of $50,000 in early May. This loan is evidently required to meet that repayment. Considering that we’ve been receiving payment every two weeks from the additional Cobre sales, one can only conclude that these payment receipts are being used to pay down the outstanding directors salaries!
Bitcoiner - many of us long term holders, who are seriously under water, woke up and smelled the coffee, long ago! I’ve seen u-turns in my life but yours, as far as prospects for SML is concerned, certainly is the most significant!
Basically, we made a grant application, a very good grant application, that everyone was super duper excited about, especially those in the grant office, but alas, we were refused.
The good news is that we learned a lot from said grant application process and the people in the grant approval office are very positive about the modified grant application that we need to submit by August 4th - smells a lot like the PEPR application process.
Speaking of the PEPR application process - the news on this is deemed less news worthy than the news that we were refused the Redmoor grant (evidenced by the fact that it’s relegated to the end of the RNS) - not a good sign considering that LCCM is the ‘near term money maker’.
In summary, the PEPR was submitted last December, we’ve not heard from them since. No wait, we did hear from them, after we contacted them to enquire why the copy and paste exercise hasn’t yet yielded results. The outcome of said contact was an explanation that there are ‘backlogs’ and in any event, our approval isn’t time critical as we’re at least 12 months away from being able to start anything.
Finally then, we’ve gone back to potential financiers of the LCCM project, one’s who have previously said ‘no, we’re not interested’, to ask them if they’re now interested and the BOD are confident of a positive outcome to these approaches, in the second half of the year!
And we all lived happily ever after, the end!
But they’ve not taken a pay cut - they’ve agreed not to draw down their full salaries so that they’re effectively giving the company a loan each month equivalent to 50% of their salaries - as such, they become creditors to the company and will extract the amounts they are owed when cash comes into the business. Peters doesn’t take the majority of what he pays himself via salary, he charges us a consulting fee - consulting, now there’s a laugh! We can only live in hope that RAB capital decide to do something about this shambles of a situation!
Lupi,
I believe you (and I and all the other shareholders) were scammed! We were lied to, we were misled and we were led up the garden path!
Are we still paying the mine manager (for LCCM) who the board recruited more than 12 months ago? The mine manager who was recruited to a big fanfare from the board - I said at the time that I believed the recruitment to be a smokescreen - I believe they took on a mine manager to mislead us into believing their bull**** about LCCM being shovel ready and that the PEPR was about to be approved !
Gorsuch,
I made a point the other day that new auditors do not resign in the first quarter post year end due to staffing issues. It appears, based on the extract from the interim audit report, that the auditors do not see SML as a going concern!
Newly appointed auditors don’t ‘leave’ during the first quarter, post year end, due to staffing issues. I’d suspect they were intent on giving a qualified audit report (most likely due to going concern issues) and our BOD went ‘opinion shopping’
‘The Board and management have adjusted operations to ensure continuation of operations ahead of securing forward movement on EITHER Leigh Creek and/OR Redmoor’
The above is an extract from Peter’s response - unfortunately, I think LC will be mothballed, just like Care back in the day - forward movement on ‘either/or’ doesn’t look good for one or other of our two assets!
If they have information that’s pertinent, why not release it now rather than waiting until the end of the month? The only excuse I can think of is that the outlook for LC is so damning and unavoidable, that they need time to spin it properly!
Croutom,
I admire your positivity but, we had a JV partner (nearly 18 months ago) who spent some time in the data room and walked away - we've had a 'major bank' spend time in there also and to no avail - they washed their hands of it after looking under the bonnet.
We've been told in recent and not so recent RNS's that there are interested financiers who are rooting around the data room - however, based on what you said below, the BOD would have us believe that the outstanding PEPR isn't causing a problem with raising capital - therefore, it must be the business case that makes no sense (remember, this project was given away by a previous owner and we bought it approximately one week after another suitor walked away - said purchase on the back of a due diligence carried out by our 'not heard from recently' chairman).
I disagree with your opinion on a financier not willing to commit 'subject to PEPR approval' - this type of thing happens in business every day - 'we'll invest, subject to a, b, c etc....' - consequently, I don't believe that there is an investor waiting in the wings to swoop in as soon as we get PEPR approval and that's why the market, correctly in my opinion, is valuing us at £0.0025 - nobody believes the rhetoric from the BOD!
Croutom - if the current PEPR situation isn't holding up finance then surely something else must be? If the PEPR was approved in the morning, it wouldn't have any positive impact on us getting finance? Did Peters tell you that PEPR approval isn't holding up financing?
Fieldwolf - I think the mistake in your analysis is that you believed what Peters told you - the man at best is economical with the truth and tends to mislead with ease. You need to remember that this is the man who announced, via an RNS, that we had received written confirmation from the 'major Cobre client' that payment was on the way when in fact, he had received a text message, from a now convicted con-woman, who was simply replying to his numerous texts after she had gone to ground - if I'm not mistaken, they used that 'text' as the basis for an equity raise at the time.
His side kick, Wale, was last heard from, not last December but the December before, when he informed us about all of the value changing news that was imminent.......the tumbleweed is still rolling by.
I, like many others on here, wait in hope that this comes good but if it does, it won't be anything to do with the three stooges who have been extracting extravagant unearned salaries for the past 3 years!
We've had potential JV partners and 'international banks' look under the bonnet and walk away - we, the shareholders, have been fed lies by the BOD but we've never had the chance to see what the potential funding partners have seen and based on the fact that none of them have progressed to a funding offer, I'd suspect that what they've seen isn't pretty.
If the board had achieved nothing in the past 5 years, the share price would be where it was on December 1, 2017 - 2.15p - they've decimated the company value to the tune of 90%, all the while extracting obscene salaries and bonuses.
There isn't a snowballs chance in hell that any funding partner will advance money as long as this shower (AB; PW and JP) are in charge - the problem, if and when we eventually are rid of them is that we'll then get to see exactly what we as a company have to offer funding partners, and I fear it may not be what we've been led to believe it is - hopefully RAB capital have a plan and fingers crossed that the next announcement isn't to advise that they have reduced their ownership as that will definitely be the death knell for SML.
We scoffed at Hursty, JP Ryan and Fira but they were the ones who called it correctly - Peters will have collected another $40,000 for the month of November and for what - a 90% drop in 5 years (and the 2.15 price in December 2017 was down 43% from the highs of 3.75 earlier that year.......how are these wasters still at the helm?)
No, it’s not ‘start of mine by year end’ it’s ‘start of mine by year end, subject to finance’ - at this stage I think it’s safe to assume that everyone has left the data room (you’ve got to take note of the things Peters doesn’t tell you in an RNS) so accessing finance is most likely a non-runner.