Each director of a company is legally obliged to use his/her skill and knowledge to look after the investment interests of the shareholders in the company that he/she has the privilege of directing.
I am astounded how BDR produced so many optimistic ASX statements and had several fund raising episodes, yet has still drifted to the brink of insolvency. When I owned shares in BDR, I sent queries to the board but these questions were unanswered.
At the last AGM of BDR I queried how the open pit (at Tucano) was optimized, specifically:
a) How was the pit optimized? How did BDR consider the transition from open cut mining to underground mining in the optimization, when there was no concerted effort to determine how the ore would be mined by underground methods. (Did the company use Whittle 4D optimization)
b) How much copper is in the ore? In the oxide transition zone, any copper occurring as bornite would pose problems in the cyanide leaching circuit because the bornite reacts with the cyanide and consumes it before it has a chance to react with the gold. I was told publicly by the MD that the deposit has NO COPPER present. This makes Tucano a very intriguing deposit, considering that most gold deposits contain copper-silver-gold in varying amounts
c) Did the company plan for the wet seasons when designing the (Tucano) open pit. As the designed pit became larger, then the catchment area for rainfall into the pit, and therefore the dewatering costs would increase significantly. For this reason, an underground mining plan is necessary for evaluating how to best mine the deposit. Perhaps a smaller pit followed by underground mining would be more cost effective.
d) The last capital raising (I thought ) was stated to use some of the money for increased exploration, but after the last capital raising, the exploration budget was not increased. Why?
The directors of the company are well academically qualified, experienced and intelligent people, so I am confident that they would have already considered these issues. Why then was I not given a satisfactory reply at the AGM?
Directors in any company have a fiducial responsibility to look after shareholders' interests and to keep the market fully informed. (That is the limit to which I shall comment but …..
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To repeat (in a more sanitized form) concerns from some of my earlier posts....)
1. Coarse gold:
What intrigues me is that so many early drill results reported very high levels of gold and abundant VISIBLE gold in the drill core. In that situation the heavy minerals concentrator at the mill MUST have collected this coarse gold. Where has it gone???? I would like to see a gold audit as to how much of this coarse gold was actually collected. Does the reserve model have estimates of the coarse gold and estimates of the finer gold? We should see a tabulation of the grades "mined" from the reserve models, against the mill head sampling, the tailings sampling, and the gold production. Any capable geologic manager and managing director carrying out due-diligence would insist on getting these figures
2. A request to BDR management:
When you assayed for gold, did you even bother to do screen the gold fire assays (ie screen fire assays) to determine how much of the gold was coarse gold.
3. A letter to Dr Mike Donaldson:
You were the geological director for BDR and in this role you provided technical oversight as a gold geologist. You took your fees and the share issues. Please comment.
These are fundamental questions about the operation of the company.
Why could I not get a response?????
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