NRG Energy Inc V.NRG

BCSC BANS/PENALTIES~QCX PRES JAMES VOISIN & JOHN ARCHIBALD

[moneywagon]

13 Oct 2022, 21:56

 

@BearTank Need to see more of this. #index Street Wire: BCSC permanently bans former QCX president Voisin by Mike Caswell The B.C. Securities Commission has banned and fined James Voisin and John Archibald, two men behind an overstated resource estimate on a QCX Gold Corp. project in Mexico. The BCSC said that the estimate was based on questionable drill hole data, with the consultant who prepared it specifying that it was not for public disclosure. The company later determined that the project held a considerably smaller resource. The penalties are contained in a decision that the BCSC released on Thursday, Oct. 13. The regulator has permanently banned Mr. Voisin, 65, who was the company's president during the period at issue. Specifically, he is barred from trading, serving as an officer or director, and from promoting stocks. He must also pay $166,790, with most of the money comprising an administrative penalty. The penalties were lighter for Mr. Archibald, 75, a professional engineer who prepared a National Instrument 43-101 report based on the estimate. The BCSC banned him for 10 years (on the same terms as Mr. Voisin) and ordered him to pay $75,000. The fine and ban come on top of even lighter sanctions that the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario imposed on Mr. Archibald, with those penalties limited to a three-month suspension along with education and supervision requirements. The sanctions go back to 2014, when QCX (then known as First Mexican Gold Corp.) was looking for somebody to prepare a resource estimate on its Hilda 30 concession in Mexico. According to the BCSC, Mr. Voisin hired a consultant to prepare a "down and dirty" calculation, done as cheaply as possible. Mr. Voisin told the consultant that the estimate would "not be anywhere near a public document." After some back and forth (that included Mr. Voisin rejecting the initial estimate as too conservative), the consultant produced a document for Mr. Voisin. She warned him that the numbers were "pretty twitchy" because of the limited drill data available. The BCSC said that Mr. Voisin almost immediately set about using the numbers in a public document. He contacted Mr. Archibald and had him put the figures into a National Instrument 43-101 report. (The report, which the company released on Oct. 28, 2014, pegged Hilda 30 as having 225,000 gold equivalent ounces near surface.) It quickly became clear that the figures in that report were wildly inaccurate, the BCSC said. The consultant, who was still having some discussions with Mr. Voisin, determined that some of the drill results she had received from the company were incorrect. She then issued a revised estimate, which lowered the amount of gold by 72 per cent and the amount of silver by 83 per cent. The BCSC said that Mr. Voisin did nothing to disclose the reduced figures until two years later. Meanwhile, Mr. Voisin was busy selling shares, the BCSC said. The regulator determined that he unloaded 2,711,000 shares between Jan. 29, 2016, and Nov. 23, 2016, realizing $86,919. He sold another 3,575,500 shares before the company released an updated resource estimate on Sept. 26, 2017, realizing a further $75,583, the BCSC claimed. For his part, Mr. Voisin argued against any substantial penalties, saying that he had almost no money and had limited possibilities of generating income. He also said that he realized no profits by selling his shares, as he had sold the shares for less than the purchase price. He further claimed that he had delayed disclosing the problems with the resource estimate because he had believed the lower amounts to be incorrect. As for Mr. Archibald, he emphasized that his role was lesser than that of Mr. Voisin. He claimed to be unaware that the figures provided by the consultant were not to be for public disclosure. He also pointed out (as did Mr. Voisin) that the infraction was a first-time one. The penalties were handed down by a three-member panel that heard the matter over six days in June, 2021. Mr. Voisin was represented by Vancouver lawyer Patricia Taylor, while Mr. Archibald represented himself initially, and later hired Vancouver lawyer William Stransky.

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from @beartank,  about 12 hours ago

 

@Silver2021 ^ There are many companies like that (misleading information). I wonder what prompted the investigation.

 

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about 12 hours ago