RE: Same old game I have held NAG shares for a long time (about 8 or 9 years), and I can't believe how companies like this can be allowed to continue to operate.
According to the Bloomberg pages, Charles is CEO of:
NAG: Comp of 206K;
SLT: Comp of 160K
SOV: Comp of 110K
ZNR: Comp of 137K
That's over 613K in annual comp! And his companies have never amounted to anything.
Anyways, I think the biggest problem is how NAG (and companies with similar MOs) can put out press releases promoting the promising new opportunities at some land they've aquired rights on. Then they promote the preliminary investigations. Then they find another site and start promoting that, so when the first site turns out to be a bust, it's not as 'material' as the new prospect and we never hear anything about the original site again. This merry-go-round strategy allows them to circumvent the obligation under securities regulations to publicly report material information. Basically, new prospects are deemed material and worthy to report on, but by the time that prospect has been adequately explored and determined that it has no promise, there is a new prospect that is 'material' and since the old prospect has no value, there's no obligation to provide any closure. Just look back at NAG's reporting history: the company went from gold to uranium to coal; from opportunity to opportunity, always announcing prospects, but never updating shareholder on when they abandonded a site, stopped investigating, or got a bad research report.
The OSC should change reporting obligations for these types of issuers such that any prospect that is decided to be material enough to provide public disclosure about when it's first aquired should require public disclosure to announce the results of all explorations on that site and announce whenver a site has been abandoned, a lease allowed to lapse, or no further exploration done on a site for a period of more than 12 months. That way, looking at a company's disclosure record would allow potential investors to connect the dots and see that most of the company's prospects have never amounted to anything - which can be a pretty telling signal.