Just an interesting aside. Ivernia (IVW) has a pure lead mine in Australia capable of supplying 2% of world demand. They ran into horrendous environmental problems at their shipping port a couple of years ago and have been struggling since. The stock has dropped from $1.50 to the $0.15 range over the past year or so. They recently made a deal to sell notes to keep them afloat and it appeared that things might slowly improve from here. They just started shipping product from inventory. Today a company in China, Griffin Mining, made a public announcement without informing IVW, that Griffin is offering to buy IVW for $0.15 per share. The offer announcement makes statements that I view as quite critical of IVW's management and Griffin has included a list of onerous demands that must be met if the offer is to be carried forward. I have held IVW for some time. IVW has a close relationship with another Chinese trading company that buys IVW's product and appears to be a strong, supportive business partner.

Just thought this might be of some interest to ECU holders. This is a very aggressive move by Griffin exhibiting a sad disregard for IVW's management and obviously taking advantage of IVW's vulnerability as it slowly gets itself back into regular business after a long period of struggle. I would certainly hate to see anything similar happen to ECU although the company's situation is obviously quite different from IVW's. It is going to be very interesting and instructive to see how this move by Griffin plays out.