RE: HIGH RIVER HOLDINGS
You want to hear something even more unreal? Let's use a very conservative value for Taparko of $150M and Bissa of $50M and the HRG Holdings at $70M.
That's at least $270M of HRG's assets that pledged against a piddly $20M remaining on the Royal Gold debt. Unbelievable!!! And, they still refuse to provide any type of forbearance. Unreal! I have a description for sharks like Royal Gold, but I'm not going to mention it.
On top of that, HRG posted $39M in cash at the end of Q3 and I expect at least $44M cash flow in Q4 (with over 2/3 of the quarter gone already). Royal Gold's debt could have easily been eliminated already. I HOPE OWNERWISER IS VERY SUCCESSFUL IN HIS EFFORTS!!! In my view, the lack of TSX and OSC actions to stop all of this injustice (IMO) is pathetic. I no longer have any faith or trust in the Canadian securities system. IMO, predators are easily able navigate around the system (carve up minority shareholders) and make billions of dollars from it, and I do not see any efforts by the people in charge to even admit there is a problem, never mind fixing the problems.
As a side note, to this day, I have no clue of what Moosher and Whalen were thinking. All they had to do was issue 20 million shares @ $1.75 or so (and maybe a bit more to account for the exchange rate) to get the US$35M (instead of the ridiculous deal with Royal Gold) and HRG would still be flying right now (IMO) - it was really as simple as that, in my view (they tried to get fancy). IMO, the share count would likely still be around 300 - 350 million, even after a bit of dilution to fix the mines and pay off the pressing debt (not pushing 800 million). High River's share price would be following a similar path to Eldorado Gold, Peter Hambro and Red Back Mining. With no treat of foreclosure existing from Royal Gold the past couple of years, High River would likely be trading now in the $6 - 8 range, with the 300 - 350 million shares out.
As an example of how a developing operation addresses its debt situation, one can go back to 2006 and see what Yamana Gold did. Their share price was revalued from about $4.50 to over $10.00. What was the first thing they did? You got it, removed all of their major risks by doing an equity offering to remove all of their debt. HRG had the exact same opportunity when their share price went from $1.50 to over $3.00. I was expecting them at that point to do an equity offering to remove some of their most pressing debt amounts also (to take some of the pressure off of their start up mines to delivery perfectly). Of course, this is all in the past, but these are just clear differences between good management and poor management (IMO).
We'll see what happens after the Severstal debt is eliminated. Severstal had second security on all of the pledges highlighted above. With them out of the way, we'll see if Royal Gold finally decides to provide some type of forbearance. Although, I am not holding my breath, based on their actions so far.