I think you are absolutely right and hit the nail on the head.

Put yourself in the position of a mining executive. This government is so inept I would not trust them to tell me the time of the day, let alone trust tehm with billions of dollars in investments. Yes, I would not risk any more new investments there for sure.

The ill conceived 180 day moratorium is one prime example.

What purpose would that serve? For the life in me, if the foreign companies want to continue work and keep our people employed, let them! That never stopped us before from changing our minds after they wasted all their money. After all we are the Ecuadorian government and we have the God given right to act irresponsibly at all time, so why stop the work!

Now we have to scramble and do damage controls with the international investment communities, as well as our own irrated unemployed miners screaming for work. I guess an immediate lift of the moratorium, which solves all problems (albeit an absolute about face and a tremandous loss of face) is not an acceptable solution. Instead we have to put out more spin on this to save whatever face that's is really totally lost. Great.

Now that I am on a rant, whatever happened to the "stability agreements" that all parties worked on before all these nonsense hit? Looks like there is another example that why we should not trust this government. Looks like they just pull the plug and said "we just changed our minds and we'll do it this way". Not even an apology was offered.

If I run Barrick and Newmont, or any major. I would only be interested in ARU under the most favourable bargain price. After all you may have to sit out this governemnt and see what the next one does. If that's the case, there is no rush to jump in an make an offer anytime soon, isn't it. They can always sit on the side line and let these poor juniors sweat some more first - and lower the price even more.

Sorry if I ruin everyone's day so far. That's my opinion anyway and I could very well be dead wrong.