Ann: China Pit Scoping Study Finalised, page-55

This is a great interview by the way. This response says a lot about their strategy for dealing with sovereign risk and to me shows that John and the company have the smarts to minimise this risk as much as possible.  

What can you do to protect yourself? I would say you always have to look to your local partners. We’ve chosen two partners, these are major economic participants and are major employers. One of our partners, East Asia Power, is the mining arm of a group that includes the Europe and Asia Company and that company employs 15,000 people, has a dozen factories in Myanmar and makes about 70% of the fast moving consumer goods in the country. We’ve got two nice big gorillas at the table with us. If I could perhaps describe it this way, we’ve made ourselves a hard target deliberately. We tied ourselves up with folks that are obviously not the sort of companies that government would like to annoy, so perhaps if they felt they were going to do something with a mining asset they will go and choose somebody else’s mining asset. That’s about as good as I can do to protect us. I always believe that when you’re operating in a foreign country you rely so much on your in-country partner and we’ve picked two really good partners in that sense.