A shakeup at the top of Woulfe Mining Corp. (WOF.V) has led to a declining share price in the natural resource company engaged in the acquisition, exploration, and development of mineral properties in South Korea, leaving shareholders with many questions but very few answers.
On Wednesday WOF.V announced that Brian and Amelia Wesson had resigned from their positions as directors of the Company and as its President and Chief Executive Officer and VP of Business Administration, respectively, in order to pursue other opportunities.
Making the resignations all the more perplexing is the fact that it has been less than two weeks since WOF.V announced they had been named one of the 2013 TSX Venture 50 companies, an annual ranking of strong performers listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.
In that announcement Brian Wesson stated “”It is an honour for Woulfe to be included in the top 50 companies on the TSX Venture Exchange and testimony to the efforts of our staff and support of our investors in the redevelopment of the Sangdong tungsten/ molybdenum project in South Korea.” Those don’t sound like the words of a company president and CEO preparing to resign.
Of course just four days after that announcement WOF.V issued a press release to “clarify, retract, restate and update certain of its previously issued investor relations presentations, reports and disclosures on its website following a review by the British Columbia Securities Commission.
Among the issues that proved problematic:
- The website and Materials contained aggregated resource numbers which added Inferred Resources to other categories of resources in respect of the Sangdong property, or which used a category of mineral resources, specifically “mineable resource”, not permitted by NI 43-101 in respect of the Muguk property.
- The website and Materials discloses the results of economic analyses from the Company”s feasibility study which may be misleading and/or unbalanced as the website and Material only reference pre-tax results without disclosing the comparative post-tax results. Investors are strongly encouraged to review the Feasibility Study in full.
- The Guide contained a reference to historical, non-43-101 compliant, resource estimates for the Sangdong Moly Stockwork
- The website and Materials incorrectly references a 0.20% cut-off in relation to the 2012 resource estimates, where a 0.15% cut-off was used
All of this is related to WOF.V’s Sangdong tungsten mine, their flagship project in South Korea, historically the world’s largest tungsten mine for over 40 years. WOF.V has said they expect to return to production by the fourth quarter of 2013 and have strategic agreements with International Metalworking Companies B.V., a partnership that “brings strategic advantage given Woulfe’s mining and processing technical abilities and IMC”s downstream manufacturing skills, high level of innovation and quality of products sold into the global tungsten market.”
What shareholders want the partnership to bring is money to get the project moving faster but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment and given today’s shakeup in management there may be some cause for concern.
That being said there are also those who believe the shakeup has been a long time coming and that with a stronger management team in place WUF.V may actually be in a position to move forward rather than sit idle.