Member Info for rcgl2

IIRC one third of the board of directors is up for re-election each year. Last year it happened to be Mather's turn, which allowed the vote against him to happen. Wonder what the situation would be like today if he hadn't been up last year... So this year he should not be up for re-election. He was elected as a board director last at last year's AGM, even if it was by a less than convincing majority.

RK can you remind us, have you been invited to attend one of these corporate governance sessions alongside other shareholders, or have you got a one-on-one chat with Twigger lined up? It would be interesting if you were able to find out what it is that the company is discussing or being asked about by other institutional holders, rather than just being given a slot in which to put your own questions to them. When are you meant to be speaking to them?

Agree sire f things can be done remotely but many senior managers don't think it's ideal. Could be that some suitable candidates needed to relocate from London or Toronto to Australia? Given that there is a material risk that Solg gets taken out in the next year or so, perhaps a generous change of control bonus isn't enough. No one will want to relocate their family to the other side of the world if they may find themselves out of a job in less than a year.

If it's about sounding out views before the AGM do you think that means they are planning to put something controversial to shareholders? After the events of last year's AGM I had been expecting this year's meeting to be completely banal. Just the bog standard set of resolutions that any company would pass any year and a bit of administrative stuff like reappointing whoever was up for re-election. Wasn't expecting anything ground breaking.

Also they have spent most of this year trumpeting how their corporate governance has been completely refreshed and is in line with the code etc etc, they have the new directors, new committees and as they said to someone the other day once a new CEO is appointed KM will revert back to non exec status.

Addicknt I agree, the whole thing is baffling. I thought the ship had been steadied and we could just sit back and enjoy a raft of good news this quarter. This is starting to bring back memories of the drama around last year's AGM and what Solg doesn't need is any more drama.

It's not as if Solg will draft the entire PFS themselves. They have about 6 external partners working on various aspects, Wood Group etc etc

Yes fair enough. I'm generally super patient (multi-decade time horizon and all that) when it comes to investments and as you know I'm not really a believer in the theories of skullduggery and manipulation here... I tend to think the lack of upward SP movement is the result of the much more mundane fact that no one is buying in any volume. However I'm finding myself starting to get annoyed with the apparent lack of news now and questioning why it is taking so long for the CEO and CFO positions to be filled.

I know the PFS is the biggie and it will come when it's ready, I was expecting the backend of Q4 rather than anytime in October. But in the meantime there is loads of other stuff going on and I would have thought some drilling results or news on low priority licence JVs would have arrived by now.

I don't like the fact that at the moment the board seems to be having to carry out too much of the executive management of the company, because the two key executive roles are vacant and have been for some time.

Colonel you've been pretty bullish over the last couple of months, and why wouldn't we be with all the news that's due this quarter. But last couple of days you seem to be getting a bit nervous. We could just dismiss this letter as a bit of a silly non move by a fairly minor hedgie who was trying to give the board a kick up the backside to make sure PFS comes this year. And the company issued a bit of a non response back. Do you really think it's more than that and that this is a sign of something more ominous unfolding behind the scenes?

Yes and the experience has been invaluable already because imo it was clearly Keith Marshall who put a stop on the original PFS at the last minute. Which is likely in the long run to have been a very good thing.

They have a block cave expert, Keith Marshall. He was president of Oyo Tolgoi amongst other things. Kevin O'Kane also has extensive executive experience running large scale mines, for BHP. That's why they were brought onto the board.

CD the oil market is manipulated but not by the Fed and US banks. It's manipulated by OPEC+ in order to suit their own ends. The oil price tanking as the world went into shutdown is understandable, the basics of supply and demand. What pushed it to insane levels was Saudi Arabia and Russia choosing that moment to start pumping out massive amounts of excess supply in a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the US shale industry and take back market share.

Negative prices were not as insane as they sound when you think of it rather as the storage cost of oil exceeding the cost of the oil itself. In a way it was the rational result of a situation where oil storage demand outstripped storage supply. Negative prices were essentially a means of paying those with storage capacity a huge premium to take the stuff off your hands before you found yourself in a much worse position of being delivered thousands of barrels of oil with no means to store it.

No we find ourselves in the situation that demand is bouncing back but supply is limited, not only because OPEC is back on message in terms of limiting supply to boost prices but also because all of the political and ESG pressure on developed market producers to try to pull away from fossil fuels and not invest in new exploration. I completely agree with you that politicians have talked a big talk about the energy transition but have failed to do anything positive about it. They haven't invested anywhere near enough. All they have done is take seemingly easy negative steps like cut UK gas storage capacity in the hope that we can magically transition to renewables overnight... And we now see the effect of those policy blunders in soaring gas prices.

I don't think the Fed and BofE and governments have anywhere near the ability to manipulate markets as people think. The reality is they are all too inept to control most things and most of the substantive effects they do bring about are unintended consequences.

https://www.rns-pdf.londonstockexchange.com/rns/8276O_1-2021-10-12.pdf

Here is the letter.

*130%

Hi Quady, how do you square that with the Noront situation, where BHP have got into a bidding war? Their 55c bid being something like 160% premium to the pre-offer share price?

If anyone listens to the Value After Hours podcast there was a good comment from Jake Taylor in the latest episode talking about owning businesses/holding shares during market drawdowns: "your ownership is probably worth more than what the last trade thinks it is worth."

Another thought worth bearing in mind while we hold Solg. The market price is dictated by the marginal buyer and seller, it's whatever people right now are willing to buy and sell shares at, even if it's just relatively few shares. If the SP has gone down by 5% in the last week it doesn't mean that the company and your holding is inherently worth less than what it was a week ago. A lot of investors, both PIs and institutions, have decent size positions in Solg and are just holding. Forget what short term traders and algos are doing at the margins. Keep holding your Solg shares and wait for the value in the business to be properly realised.

Here's a quote from billionaire fund manager Ron Baron that was in Moneyweek a couple of weeks ago that I thought was worthwhile remembering while we hold Solg. Asked about what makes him sell a share.

"I give up because we made a mistake on the business... I don't give up because a stock doesn't perform... stock performance isn't a measure of whether the business is successful or not," says Baron. "We were an investor in Tesla for... six years and didn't make a return. And then... we made seven times in a year."

Don't be so deliberately thick. The actor leaving and the character dying are two completely different things. Of course I know Daniel Craig is stopping playing Bond, just like all the previous actors did. I did not know what happens at the end of the film but now thanks to you I do and so does everyone else here who might have wanted to enjoy it.

Don't tell us to get a life if that's how you go around getting your kicks like an immature schoolboy.

Did you really just give away a huge spoiler and ruin it for all of us who haven't seen it yet? Seriously?

If that's true that's actually one of the most obnoxious messages I've seen on here and that's saying something.

Thanks a lot. And I spent some of my time yesterday typing out that explanation you asked for of my previous post.

Let's just stick to talking about solgold here shall we?

Addicknt, I would add to what you said that these company sources who are speaking to RK, DBW etc know full well that what they say is being reported back to forums like this one and disseminated amongst PIs.

So they may well say that everything is off the record etc but they know we are reading between the lines of what they say.

CEO appointment being a prime example of them hinting to investors that it was about 2 weeks away, numerous times over a period of about 3 months now.

Hi Zoros. Honestly I don't know exactly what it means. However I thought it was worth discussing this (and it didn't seem to have been mentioned since the structure was laid out in the annual report) for a few reasons.

- it seems to be tax efficient. UK has no tax treaty with Ecuador, so Solg Plc as a UK entity would I assume be liable for full Ecuadorian WHT on any capital gains, divs, interest etc that it receives from its Ecuadorian subsidiaries. Switzerland however does have a tax treaty with Ecuador, which should limit the withholding tax payable on any funds sent from Ecuador back up to the Swiss AG.
- NM had said in the past that selling Alpala would not be tax efficient. So could this new structure suggest that they are making it more tax efficient if they do need to sell off any of their interests in Ecuador?
- one of the directors of the AG board, is a guy who works for their specialist adviser Bluequest, which was appointed to advise them on concentrate marketing and related topics. I just thought this was interesting, they really are making sure they are fully set up to become a producer and are lining up the necessary expertise to market what they produce.
- I assume this entity and the adviser's expertise is being put in place with a view to financing Alpala.
- some people think that Solgs aim is to negotiate or encourage a takeover. And that they are going through the motions of becoming a producer in anticipation of being taken over. I don't think this is the case. I think Solg Is actually set on becoming a producer. But if they get taken over by a major in the meantime, well that's fine so long as the price is high enough.

DBW, that marketscreener page is double counting Nick Mather's holdings. He holds most of his shares through Samuel plus a few other bits and bobs. The shares held by Samuel are including in the 3.96% disclosed as Mather's holding.