Ann: Appointment of CEO, page-4

Not sure poppy but I do think the timing of this is probably significant. Smacks of horses for courses to me.

Here's a short recap of Danakali leadership. The original CEO was Paul Donaldson, who is a mining engineer. He steered the company through all the technical studies of the Colluli project leading up to the decision to go for it. The three major outstanding issues for Danakali when Paul Donaldson left (but only as far as a board position) were the debt and equity raising needed to fund the project and how to sell the product.

Danakali replaced Paul Donaldson with a marketing specialist, Danny Goeman, who oversaw Danakali getting an offtake agreement with EuroChem based on a take it or pay (?) arrangement which apparently is unique in the potash sector (but common enough in other mining sectors). As soon as that deal was done exit stage left Danny Goeman. What was left to do were the debt and equity raisings and then onto the construction phase.

It is my guess that rather than Danakali bringing in a finance specialist they decided to stop-gap replace the marketing guy with Seamus Cornelius, the executive chairman who is also a corporate lawyer, to work through the debt and equity stuff, But also at that point they decided to bring in the bloke who they hoped would take over the construction and commissioning phases. And that bloke was Niels Wage who likely knows not much about finance but does have lots of experience running mining businesses, including of potash. Effectively Niels Wage has been getting up to speed on the Colluli project whilst Seamus Cornelius has been working through the debt and equity raising processes.

And so we get to today. My guess /hope is that Seamus Cornelius is now confident that both the debt and equity processes are close enough to being done that he can now hand over the CEO reins to the operations guy, Neils Wage, in preparation for the "the project execution" which is "set to commence".

So in short, I suspect that this announcement is more than just fluffing the cushions.