WB, I don't believe that they will have trouble getting the mining permit. Madagascar acts slowly.
I believe that putting in the full plant with annual graphite concentrate production of 53,000 tonne would be a major problem because of EGZ's low price and its large number of shares. Doing the reverse split in such a situation would be worst, even with costs for the full plant spread equally between a production loan and equity. Please see the paragraph about Largo at the end of this post.
In every case they should complete the staged development plan without doing a reverse split. The staged development plan should allow EGZ to put various forms of graphite on the market at equitable prices.
When the staged development plan is satisfactorily completed they might consider a maximum 1 for 3 share reverse split and possibly a JV to still lower the cost of the full plant.
We should consider that the life of the proven and probable graphite production at 53,000 tonne annually is 26 years, so kicking production up to 100,000 tonne annaully would allow for a mine life of 13 years. Additionally conversion of the large measured and indicated resource to proven and probable would extend mine life considerably.
Then one should consider EGZ's battery grade vanadium resource which later may be part of a JV.
When considering reverse splits and the resouces sector one should look at Largo Resources who presently has a good ferro-vanadium mine in production and did a 1 for 10 reverse split in October of 2014. Which allowed Largo's then 1,092,627,305 Common Shares to be reduced to 109,262,730 Common Shares. Largo had good initial backing and an off-take in place with commodities giant Glencore. Now after 2¼ years Largo has 437.8 million shares, mainly because the ferro- vanadium price has yet to fully cooperate.