" but the contract did not call for a notice to be delivered, it did call for the feasibility... "

Section 5.4 of Salazar " Salazar shall forthwith provide Teck Cominco with written notice( the "Feasibility Notice") which shall include....

The FN is essentially a cover page letter which tells Teck that CUU is claiming the indirect interest in a formal manner and would contain the FS and financial statement as attachments. There was also a 30 day clock for Teck to acknowledge the the FS was a PBFS under section 5.5 a and b. The key point here is that without a FN there was no clock, so Elmer was in fact abiding by the terms of the Salazar contract when 120 days passed. I suspect he couldn't state publically that that he was negotiating a JV agreement that could replace Salazar since events that may happen are not material and would have resulted in a lot of confusion. On a go forward basis we all have to decide if the JV agreement was an adequate replacement and what Teck will decide to do when the optimization study is complete.