Metals X chief executive Peter Cook is still seething over the company’s unsuccessful effort to acquire a stake in the Central Tanami gold price, vowing to continue his pursuit of Tanami Gold through the courts.
At the Diggers & Dealers forum in Kalgoorlie, Mr Cook said he remained unhappy about Tanami’s decision to abandon an agreed deal with Metals X in favour of a higher-priced offer from Northern Star Resources.
“There is a counter-claim by Metals X against Tanami, a damages claim, and that’s in the courts, and daylight will be the disinfectant on that,” he said.
Metals X, which had been buying up a suite of unloved gold assets in recent years, struck a deal in March to acquire up to a 75 per cent interest in the Central Tanami mine through a combination of cash, shares and spending on the project. But Northern Star trumped the offer less than three weeks later with an almost identically worded but higher priced offer, prompting Metals X’s threat of legal action.
Mr Cook said Metals X and Tanami had deliberately excluded a clause that would allow Tanami to walk away if it received a better offer to ensure the deal would succeed.
“Agreements normally have the words ‘in the absence of a higher offer’ attached to them, unless you want them to be legally binding, and there’s typically a break fee in those,” he said. “We agreed to leave it out because they didn’t want me to go away. They wanted to have Metals X on the hook.”
Mr Cook said the legal action was driven both as a matter of principle and by the quality of the asset in dispute.
