I must say that I am happy to see some changes. JP must really believe in this assest, and for a man who does his homework, that is a good thing.
Cost reductions are good. I hope the CEO took at least a 40% cut, as he should be rewarded mainly from share price appreciation. For too long he has taken a big salary and bought next to no shares himself. He needs more skin in the game.
Being a large shareholder, JP has plenty of skin in the game and he is obviously hurting like the rest of us. Great to see him taking over as president of the board, and even better that we have keith barron back.
My guess is the current CEO was put in place for his background in finance thinking those skills would be handy for all the mergers and acquisitions they would like to do in future. However, I think they forget about getting the basics of good geological data in place first. I think it would have been better to have a CEO with a background in geology or mining to lead us through the resource definition phase. Instead, we had a disaster of a resource update process taking way too long and coming up way short of expectations.
With the share price so depressed and the need for financing, the Sandstrom type model of financing where a portion of future production is sold seems to me to be the best option. But Sandstorm also like to have a CEO in place who has been there and done that before they will give out any money. Fair enough too. Hopefully having Keith Barron on the board will give the financiers confidence that management has the goods to take this asset to a production decision.
So in summary, not happy to be in our current position, but happy to see some much needed changes and a better direction for the future.
Golden Kiwi
