RE:Can someone please explain Thanks to helpful links posted by jake and Reid I think I now understand it (I'm a Brit who bought my shares through the LSE, and the RVO concept was new to me). The deal as it stands will indeed take all our shares and leave us with nothing. Sprott is the only secured creditor - meaning he made a loan to PGM with the express condition that he gets the assets if they can't pay it back (about $130M). That's why he gets first dibs on everything up to that value, but other creditors are still owed money too.
Under normal circumstances a failed company would get dismantled and the assets distributed (secured creditors still coming first), and the shares would disappear. The RVO thing means that instead they let it continue as a company and be sold, so the shares continue to exist and only the bad parts like the unpaid loans get separated off and eventually cancelled. The new buyer gets all the shares, and the (in this case) secured creditor gets the sale proceeds. Keeping the company in existence means that things like permits and workforce contracts stay in place. Given that the shareholders would have ended up with nothing anyway, destroying that value by winding it up would be kind of spiteful. But the danger of the RVO mechanism is that it makes it a bit less troublesome for a bad actor going in deliberately intending to end it that way.
Whether that happened here is for the courts to decide, but in all honesty it seems unlikely. When all is settled Sprott will still have lost most of his loan, and everyone else (including the biggest shareholder Ashanti) will have lost everything. I bought my PGM shares at about the time the O'Dea team took over. The reports had the ring of truth for me. I've got a geological background and the attempt to turn the mine around seemed genuine from a technical perspective. We were very unlucky that the gold price slumped in the later months of 2022, even while high inflation made it look like it should be healthy. If the recent jump to $2000+ had happened six months earlier things might have turned out very differently.