He got himself suspended for three months. Probably back some...

He got himself suspended for three months. Probably back some time in January.

For some time @CEOChair had "GTE is a 10 bagger for sure or I'm a bowl of soup" in his signature. That was when Great Western was "drilling" for opportunities in Kazakhstan. They lured Mr Luckett with the promise of highly prospective tenements with histories of tantalising drill results from the seventies. They reeled him in and played him along with potential joint ventures with the state authorities. When those never-quite-materialising opportunities started to look a bit pale and tired, they sprung the possibility of acquiring an enormous tailings dump from old, inefficient mining operations with now-profitable concentrations of gold. Hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold just lying around on the surface waiting for the "savvy" operator to scoop up and extract.

They took Mr Luckett for a ride for pretty much everything we had in the bank. When he finally gave up and came home it wasn't because he'd lost faith, but we were out of money. Our assets were a couple of dusty patches of ground in WA, some optimistic vision of what structures might lie beneath, and about enough money to pay a geologist to drive out there and spend an afternoon there.

Undaunted, Mr Luckett passed the had around the shareholders and many — CEOChair included I believe — chipped in. Not me. I'd already sold in disgust early in 2014 at some loss. I've traded small parcels occasionally when the opportunity looked good for short term gains. Great Western still owes me money, but after last week's blip I think I'm close to even. For me "buy on the rumour, sell on the news" has worked awesome well; particularly as I'm still not convinced the company has what it takes to convert discoveries into any kind of remuneration.

It's a substantially different company now with better business people in management. The ridiculously optimistic language of the old announcements has been toned down considerably too. Mr Luckett is a very highly regarded geologist but I don't believe he can run a business.


Anyway, that "bowl of soup" tag has haunted CEOChair ever since. People would taunt him with it. Sometimes he would pass it off as funny. Other times he would get quite angry about it. We remember him affectionately as one of the most passionate, enthusiastic, energetic, unreserved GTE fans you could possibly imagine! I remember him finding documents and pages posted on Kazakhstani government websites, running them through Google translate and then making all kinds of inferences about how Great Western was so far "in" with the government their resources department was going to Jordan Luckett for advice on everything.