Quirkus - here is a pretty simple solution - arrange for a third...

Quirkus - here is a pretty simple solution - arrange for a third party to buy the stock at market and have ERM pay another 2-3c as a premium - yes ERM is out of pocket $1m-$1.5m but the market cap is up significantly more than that because we got some value out of the announcements.

An even simpler option was simply to buy $1-$1.5m worth of shares of them directly and take somewhere around 20m shares out of the 50m shares that were dumped over months and multiple good announcements.

Here is another possible option - ERM sets up a subsidiary investment company with $3.5m share capital, that company then buys 50m of ERM shares at 7c (market price at the time 5c) from Chinova and then the company sells its shares when the share price hit 19c for $9.5m and pays ERM a $6m dividend and returns the $3.5m capital. - Yes the SP might still be exactly where we are right now but the company has about double the cash is does right now.

I am sure there would be numerous other "solutions" that would leap out to people with much more experience in this area than me and I would like to think our management would fall into that category.

"How would you feel as an ERM/EVN shareholder a buy back at a higher price than market?
(because they'd have to offer a better price than market, surely?)" Absolutely fantastic because they might pay higher than market at the time but market would be considerably higher now. Even if we had seen no more traction from our announcements and our market cap was exactly the same as it is right now the SP would be 15.6c just due to the reduced number of shares issued.

"Why would they have accepted say 5c and 17c knowing that they would increase as the SP rallied" Their exits ensured the SP didn't rally, if the wanted to maximise the value of their shares they would have waited for the SP to increase before selling, but the queued up ready to sell at the opening price. You wouldn't have needed much of a premium to get the deal done.