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How can we forget this....

Miner moves to end chatroom debate
Date
August 17, 2010
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Barry FitzGerald

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Industry maverick Wayne McCrae at CuDeco has taken the unusual step of moving to shut down debate on an internet chatroom site on just what CuDeco's Rocklands copper discovery in north Queensland might or might not contain.
CuDeco said yesterday it had instructed its lawyers to file Supreme Court claims against HotCopper and two "posters" on the chatroom, claiming misleading and deceptive conduct and injurious falsehood.
The legal action is doubly unusual because CuDeco is in a trading halt pending the release of a long-awaited resource update on Rocklands. If the resource at Rocklands lives up to early claims by CuDeco on the importance of Rocklands, the chatter would become irrelevant.
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But the resource estimate has been more than four years in the making, leaving plenty of scope for daytraders and others that inhabit the world of investor chatrooms to talk down the potential of Rocklands, as much as others have been talking it up.
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All that is known at this stage is that the Rocklands resource update has had one of the longest gestation periods in Australian mining history.
The market is expecting an upgrade all right, but whether it will be enough to justify the group's $650 million market capitalisation remains to be seen. A high-grade core of 25 million tonnes grading 2-3 per cent copper and another 100 million tonnes of 1 per cent or less copper is the common expectation.
The lengthy gestation in the updated resource reflects the caning CuDeco endured in 2006 when it was forced to admit it had seriously overstated the size of the Rocklands copper discovery, based on drilling results at the time.
Instead of containing 59 million tonnes of copper mineralisation in the official inferred resource category, Rocklands — at the then early stage of exploration — was lucky to have 25 million tonnes of mineralisation.
The Australian Securities Exchange suspended the stock while an independent expert it appointed vetted the company's announcements on Rocklands to ensure they complied with the strict listing requirements for the reporting of mineral discoveries. That process led to the dramatic downgrading of the discovery.
CuDeco has not made a statement on the resource on Rocklands since. But it has been drilling away ever since at the property.
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