Hondobud, I cannot recall any statement from Belanger that was overly critical of KRY. They have had differences of opinion and issues in the past but those have all been resolved to everyones mutual satisfaction.

Before KRY was granted the LC contract, GRZ did approach the government with a proposal to combine LC and Brisas and they did a fair bit of work putting that case together.

As it turned out LC was granted to contract to operate LC and the GRZ proposal wasn't accepted. At that time Brisas would have been advantaged by such a deal as low metal prices made the economics of the Brisas mine fairly marginal.

With higher prices, Brisas will be a highly profitable project , with a single, relatively uniform ore body in one large pit and better copper grades overall than LC, even though gold grades are lower.

Combining the two would still make economic sense for the operator of the single combined mine, but the Venezuelan government would probably see more employment and investment by having two mines rather than one.