I don't buy the argument that you can't value without knowing what Teck backs in at. As someone that does valuations for a living, I would assume the worse case and estimate the best case value to us - this would allow me to start negotiations with CUU

This is not reasonable. It would take quite a long time, and quite a few staff to evaluate our project properly. Teck had a whole team of people looking at the feasibility. All the many thousands of pages and reports had to be examined. It took Teck months to do their due diligence on our feasibility. They downloaded the data sometime in the summer and worked on it steadily until the end of December.

Other majors will not put this degree of effort into the project until they know what Teck is going to do. The liklihood is that Teck will take it all and they will have wasted their time. They cannot make any assumptions and put an offer to us before they realistically know not only how much it would cost to buy out CCU, but also how much of that capex they would have to pay, and the opex and all the others costs.

Moreover, I have heard from both Elmer and Mike that they are not prepared to accept low-ball offers.

Next time someone says that they won't accept any low-ball offers we should ask them what they think a low-ball offer is. It would be nice to have a floor at least.