RE:RE:RE:RE:Derek is a genius!!! I suspect that the other debt lenders were going to require some gold price hedging for the first couple years, which Derek has said previously that he was trying to avoid. Sprott did not require the hedging so they won the deal.
Ascot made the right decision here by finding a new lender. Sprott wanted a significant portion of the first year's production to be drilled to proven spacing, and within a certain timeframe. Think about the timeframe for a moment. Say it would take 3 months to complete a moderate infill drill program. The assays would take another 4 months (the last batch of assays received in February were drilled in October). And another month for an independent party to update the resource model. How much time has passed? 8 months. What month is it now? December 2022. Now the $60M US can be released for the majority of the construction works. Oh but wait, it's winter now so we wait until April 2023 to start. So construction is finished when? December 2023? You see the problem here? It wouldn't surprise me if Sprott knew that this requirement would be rejected by Ascot. Sprott made a stipulation that Ascot had to refuse because Sprott wanted out. They wanted out because there's no guarantee that they'll get anything when they try to sell PGM after bankruptcy. They can't afford to take the risk of Ascot failing on production as well. I suspect that a good chunk of the stock price decline lately has been due to the market wanting more of a price buffer because people are worried after seeing PGM fail. And that has always has been a risk here. I don't think I've ever invested in a developer that both hit its feasibility study production targets and did so in the the initially claimed timeframe. And yet 90% of the developers I've invested in have hit 1xNAV or greater. I owned PGM from January to June 2020, held through the whole covid panic, and it's disappointing to see them fail like that. But it happens.
I think we'll see a stream here in a month or two, and the NAV will remain unchanged. And since a stream deal is getting done, they will buyback and resell the historical stream as part of the deal. They'll pocket the $30M that everyone has forgotten about. Maybe more now because of the gold price. Who knows though. I thought Pretium would buy Ascot and that didn't happen.