Diamonds & Specialty Minerals Summary for Dec. 5
by Will Purcell The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Friday was a discouraging 39-64-163 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell five points to 701. Polished diamond prices, flat again today, are averaging 3 per cent less this fall than a year ago. Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF) fell one-half cent to 23 cents on 218,000 shares. Shore spurted to 25.5 cents from 19 cents Thursday, after Canada's Environment Minister signed off on the company's environmental assessment review of the Star-Orion South project in Saskatchewan. The news was anticlimactic; her bureaucrats recommended the move months ago. Still, the occasion was an opportune time for Mr. MacNeill, Shore's president and CEO, to tell investors the less palatable news of a deal concluded two weeks earlier with one of his other companies, Westcan Goldfields Inc. (WGF: $0.01). In mid-November, Mr. MacNeill, who is also CEO of Wescan, said that company would settle nearly $360,000 in debt owed to "certain service providers" by issuing 7.18 million shares at five cents. Wescan received approval from the TSX-V and concluded the transaction on Nov. 24 with the two unnamed creditors. (Given Wescan's woeful stock chart, the recipients probably appreciated the anonymity.) Late Thursday, Mr. MacNeill finally got around to telling Shore Gold shareholders that their company was one of the recipients. He said Shore accepted 4.51 million shares to cancel $225,000 in debt because Wescan, which was $650,000 in the red on Sept. 30, "did not have the cash available." Some of Shore's shareholders were perplexed, regulatory policy aside, that Wescan's Mr. MacNeill was a better negotiator - or at least more forgiving -- than his alter-ego over at Shore, as Wescan's flyspeck of a chart last saw five cents in March. The MacNeill clan launched Wescan 10 years ago to pursue gold near La Ronge -- not far from where Mr. MacNeill's father, Bill MacNeill, discovered and developed the Seabee mine 20 years earlier. Wescan's promotion carried its stock to $1.38 in 2008 but even a 1:10 rollback in 2012 cannot mask that the stock has lost 99.9 per cent of its value in six years. That cannot please shareholders of Shore, which already owned 1.3 million shares, or those of brother Tom MacNeill's 49 North Resources Inc. (FNR: $0.21), which currently holds 3.1 million Wescan shares.