defplayer,As a geologist, I'll answer a couple of your...

defplayer,

As a geologist, I'll answer a couple of your points.

#1. As Danube has said, they dug a pit on Inferred resources. As a geologist you can certify that a deposit is of a range of JORC levels, but the calculation of a Reserve is something which must take into account cash flow models, eg; cost to dig it and the waste out, cost of processing, metallurgical recoveries, cost of sales, royalties, etc. This is done by an engineer usually, who works out which parts of the resource can "fall within an open pit", ie; which parts of a resource you can dig to get a profit out of.

The geologist probably didn't do anything wrong, especially if the resources weren't all converted to Reserves. The blame for digging a JORC resource which was not adequately converted to Reserve level is SOLELY with the Board of MON, and Michael Kiernan in particular.

MK is an overbearing personality of a man. Look at the evidence - he has siphoned money out of TTY and IRl into MON and sat on all boards. For any Board of TTY or IRL to agree to that is dumb, and certainly lacking in professionalism, but with MK on the board he obviously bullied them till they broke. Now he's got TTY and IRL in the poo with him an his former friends are now enemies.

MON holders should definitely get on the phone to the company lawyers and ask them who made the decision to mine based on what decisions. If it is how we think it is, MK probably bullied the board of MON into starting "production" even though the geologist hadn't found a Reserve and the engineers were wary of saying it was doable.

Ultimately the Boards of MON, TTY and IRL must be held accountable for MK's actions, as must Michael Kiernan himself. It is atrocious and shoddy corporate governance to allow one board member of three companies to get two of them to bail out his third struggling ego play. A Board should have considered better uses for their shareholder wealth than bailing out a struggling gold miner - eg, investing in Enron or US real estate would have been appropriate alternatives. At least if you own a house in the US its an asset, not a sinking black hole like MON.

2) He believes no one will have the balls to call him on this, and secondly, he loses nothing. His $15M bail out loan was probably only contingent on TTY coming to the table, so he hasn't probably loaned MON any of his own spondoolies. As far as his legl liability goes, he's probably thinking of the names Skase, Bond, Adler when it comes to impropriety. Penalties handed down in the courts - IF you can prove negligence or fraud - are laughable. So why wouold MK give a shnitzel?

3) See above. The flaw was with management in this case - the engineer perhaps shouold have done his cash flow model better and stood up for himself and walked away. But you'll ind an engineer somewhere who'll sin off because MK says so. Why? Career advancement, options packages, wining and dining, flattery, trips to London to chat up brokers and feel important, all these and more are the tactics used to cloud the judgment of professionals so they toe the company line. You have to have strong principles and a willpower which is incompatible with closely working with a board member like MK, in order to avoid this stuff.

By the by, BDG's methodology was overworked, over technical, and over-argued. Much like MXR and MTB's supposed resources are these days - the more someone justifies something via science arguments in the ASX, the more you ought to wonder why they need to spend so much effort justifying their numbers in public. Odds are because its likely a bit iffy.

4)
On the point of sp slipping, I'd remind you that a mine is not just the Board. We see the majority of cases of insider trading related to board members, stock brokers, or people who've received their information directly from either of those two categories of people. However, a mine like Davyhurst has hundreds of people, from truck drivers to metallurgists to the mine manager and mine accountant. I know for a fact that even in december last year there were grumblings about MK and his management style. There were issues with inventories of spares, of reagents, etc. Things weren't running smoothly. On site, the experienced hands who'd worked the area 30 years before were baffled by the places they were drilling, the size of the cutbacks to get at resources, the activities which were going on. There were a lot of people who could see things were struggling from day one, and these people can tell whats going to happen, not necessarily when. I was warned off MON in January by a friend working there who said it was "a circus". So...this would be my explanation why things started to slip even as MK et al. didn't acknowledge the production difficulties and missed milesones in public (separate issue).

So, sometimes it pays to listen to the idle grumblings and snide cynicism of people like me who get on the intarwebs and act all negative. You desperaely need a few negative nellies around the traps, even if they don't own stock, because maybe there's a damn good reason they don't own stock!