The Contract
posted on
Feb 13, 2013 12:58PM
CUU own 25% Schaft Creek: proven/probable min. reserves/940.8m tonnes = 0.27% copper, 0.19 g/t gold, 0.018% moly and 1.72 g/t silver containing: 5.6b lbs copper, 5.8m ounces gold, 363.5m lbs moly and 51.7m ounces silver; (Recoverable CuEq 0.46%)
You can pick up the phone and call the legal department. The best person is Hector.
He'll tell you that the contract is the contract. He will also tell you that law in contracts is subjective and does involve the spirit of an agreement. I studied contract law for quite a few years just because I wrote a lot of them. We have not made changes to the contract. As far as I know the agreement is the master but there are some attachments not made public. It's those private sub agreements that can cause issues. They are private because they were between private entities. None of those clauses cantains anything like a hidden royalty. They are execution clauses (performance clauses) like the 4 year thing you hear much about.
CUU will not push a clause simply because Teck will not attemp to abuse the agreement. Teck will act within the body of the agreement. The 30 day thing is real. I told you guys in a post to expect what you might deem delays. That's because I couldn't see Teck waving the clause and rushing. They can extend this delay too. The conditions of bankability have change drastically since the contract was written so if the bankers want 30 days that's what they will get. That's unwritten but can we refuse? No, that's a third party delay. Whether this is on the 120 clock or not doesn't really matter. The point of the 30 days was to provide sufficient time for Teck to verify the facts and if that takes a month more, we won't argue. We can't argue that. We have to respect fairness. BTW, bankability doesn't just end with the numbers. It's a bit more complicated than that and can include external factors.
Once the evaluation is complete the 120 has to be agreed upon. That could take another week talking about the data and getting the nod from Teck. (These delays also bring us a lot closer to the enviro filing.) If this is not done already I would expect Teck to start talking to us claim by claim in a discovery process for all the land they are interested in. We have to agree to what data is acceptable because this helps them form a valuation. Many of those claims are very green but some have historical data that would need to be re-evaluated. Clocks can be stopped if unexpected info comes along after the fact. That nice little gold-copper claim we bought needs a detailed examination. Any attachments to the lands require scruitiny too.
Then we have to deal directly with Teck and Nova over the road. Notice very little has been said there. Since we cannot guarantee Teck takes us out, that negotiation has to be done seperately but in conjunction. Namely, Nova is a third party.
Yes, there's even more. But you get the idea now. We don't save one soul just to sink our ship. The AGM isn't that far off. Without a fast offer which is likely considering the lead time Teck had I would expect the vote then.