The reason juniors rarely go to production is (a) it is an entirely different skill set (b) it drains finances via dilution or debt (c) it adds risk such as envirnonmental and global markets and finally (d) time line, it adds YEARS to the end game.

I am not all that interested in 2019 dividends. The Company is doing the prudent thing in talking production but it is currently 'built' for marketing and exploration. A Compnay in this position commits suicide if it states it wants to be sold. yes AE did this infomally but formally it is 'open to all avenues'.

Stowe has cheap options so even for him his best gains will be a quick sell at a reasonable pirce. And that price will of course depend on the project economics whcih we know depends on that damn selling preice per tonne.Does AE want to wait 5 years to start getting dividends? This is why these type of compnaies sell for a NPV at a discounted rate. No risk to accept monies up front.

One comment on hostile bids. Normally if one comes in and the BOD feel it is low they pull out all stops to convince shareholders (and other suitors) that the bid is under valued. So if we were to recieve a formal hostile bid we could suddenly see news about various pricing agreemenst or LOU or whatever to support a much higher number.

The second thing to consider is - for large super sized international companies such as TODA, even a Billion dollar bid is a small investmnet and that is $17 per share for us. Regardless of how juicy the economics are a bid today of that size would be impossible to refuse. And companies like TODA dont really care what ZEN sells for today so they would not look at 'only paying a 100% permium". They would set there own value range for the property and work from there.

It is somewhat crazy selling at below evn $5 given what we know but the markets are weak and we have been under the cone of silence which creates doubt among current shareholders and created no new shareholders. In that regard i agree with mark, AE needs to start pounding the table at this stage.