Dundee retraction This Stewart characther at Dundee retracted his sloppy hatchet job from last week - I guess they've already covered their shorts.
New comment below:
Further to our informal comment, referenced above, dated Tuesday March 20th, this is to advise that we spoke with a Company representative today. We wish to correct our erroneous statement referring to the search strategy used to estimate high grade blocks. Whereas we stated that a spherical search was employed, it turns out that we were blatantly wrong. The Company employed an anistropic search ellipse - specifically in the West Zone, Shore Zone and Valley of Kings (VOK) Zones 211, 212 and 213 with maximum search radii presented in Exhibit 1. Our understanding is that estimates from Pass 1 on the Shore Zone, VOK 211, 212 and 220 were categorized as indicated resources. Measured resources are confined to the West Zone where a previous operator had completed and underground exploration program.
Furthermore, we had highlighted the statistics on the overall data set, when, in fact, the bulk of the indicated, high grade resources are confined to the VOK zones. Exhibit 2, below, presents a summary of the data distribution from that particular domain sourced from the Company's March 2012 investor presentation (Slide 9). It still seems to us that with only 1.9% of the data higher than 20 g/t, there is some risk associated with the stated average grade of the indicated resources.
Finally, appreciating that the bulk of the high grade resources occur in the VOK, we wish to point out that this is not a typical vein deposit as we'd stated, rather the mineralization is described as veins and vein stockworks that 'are concentrated in localized fold noses and along geologic contacts'. Having said that, the Technical Report authors themselves confess that:
Source: Pretivm, 43.101 Technical Report,
Like most very high grade gold systems we are familiar with, the dataset at the Brucejack is highly skewed and therefore estimating averages is challenging. We agree with the Company's stated approach to drive an underground decline into the Valley of Kings portion of the deposit to learn more about the deposit grades, geometry and reserve potential. We will maintain our cautious stance in respect of the project - but wish to reiterate that we have not visited the site or inspected the core and hence have much to learn where this project is concerned.