the final act

Well the other Australian minerals sands junior and sister company MAL blew up yesterday announcing that its Tiwi Islands project was in the toilet and was not profitable. Of course it seems that fortuitously it had managed to set in train a new direction in the coal arena and got this set before actually having to tell its shareholders that the mineral sands play was dead, despite of course a very rosy picture painted in the quarterly less than a month before that Tiwi was all aok.

In the past MAL seems to have suffered the same problems as OLY with actually telling its shareholders what the hell has been going on, but now that OLY's board is graced by the presence of MAL's Chairman Bolitho, perhaps Mr Bolitho might be able to instil a new ethic of disclosure on Oly's board, or is OLY also busy now looking for coal leases in Kalimantan before having to tell its long suffering shareholders about the reality of its totally fractured business model?

Of course the real losers with the debacle of MAL & OLY are the shareholders of TTY who under the reign of the one and only Michael Kiernan recklessly threw money into MAL and OLY and of course OLY founder Lockett's pockets and his lifestyle company NMI.

Dont expect that we will be seeing a new power in mineral sands in Australia as Kiernan's strategy is dead in the water, probably just like OLY.