High River Gold Mines Ltd HRIVF

A sad sad day.

[Power1]

We could make a movie about this story.  I'm not sure what is worse, the neglectful management squandering hundreds of millions.  A management team that arranges debt that can't be serviced even with full production or a russian entitiy that squeezed any viable work around out of the picture. 

Can there be a better example of doing business with a russian company?  This thing has smelled bad ever since they began shorting the stock to take their initial position (assuming it was severstal of course).  Immediate release of less than positive news everytime the stock gained some momentum and lack of any positive news. 

IMO, they could have restructured debt but this was never the intention and would be difficult to prove.  The very sad thing is with marketable securities of $40 million and unperforming assets that could have been liquidated, HRG had a very favorable outlook with a little tweaking of the debt repayment. 

I'll be curious to see if Sprott has any tricks in the bag or if they have written this one off.  It would be very challenging now to take any meaningful action given the majority ownership and BOD control.  Interestingly enough, I believe it may have been Sprott friendlies that introduced severstal to HRG.

Long ago, I said this was shaping up to be a TD waterhouse type deal.  Sadly, the only difference is the share price and sector. 

I wish everyone the best of luck.  This one is pickled IMO and I'm not sure what longterm benefit any action would generate beyond a little satisfaction if a wrench can be thrown in the plans.