Aurania Resources Ltd. (ARU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[indiscernible] Directors to fix their remuneration. Number three: To elect the directors of the company for the ensuing year. Number four: To approve the company's incentive stock option plan for the upcoming year. Number five: To approve certain amendments to the company's Restricted Stock Unit Plan for the upcoming year. And number six: To transact such other businesses may properly come before the meeting or any adjournments or postponements thereof. Once the formal business of the meeting has been completed, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. I will now call the meeting to order. In accordance with the bylaws of the company, I shall preside as Chairman of this meeting, I shall ask Carolyn Muir to act as Secretary of the meeting. Unless there is an objection, I shall ask Lori Winchester of TSX Trust Company to act as scrutineer for the meeting. The Secretary has advised me that the Notice of Meeting, together with the former proxy, management information circular and request form have been provided to as applicable, each director of the company, the auditors of the company and provided to each shareholder of the company of record on May 4, 2023, the record date for the meeting. An affidavit of mailing has been provided by TSX Trust Company to the company, and I direct that the affidavit be annexed to the minutes of the meeting. Accordingly, unless there is an objection, I will dispense with the reading of the notice of meeting. The scrutineer has provided me with the preliminary report regarding shareholder attendance and representation at this meeting. The scrutineer reports that there are totaled 27,982,890 shares or 41.61% of 67,247,044 shares outstanding represented at the meeting with 3 shareholders represented in person and 100 management proxies received. Accordingly, I declare that the requisite quorum of shareholders is present, and I declare the meeting is duly and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct the scrutineers' complete report on attendance be annexed to the meeting -- to the minutes of the meeting. To the best of my belief, the votes against represented by proxy on a ballot in respect of any item of business before this meeting represent less than 5% of all votes that might be cast in respect of such items of business. There are several matters that must be dealt with during this formal part of the meeting. And in order to expedite these matters, I have requested that certain persons make and second the formal motions, and I will call on these persons at the appropriate time. Shareholders may make comments on general matters during the question period to be held following the termination of the meeting. As the first item of business, the company's audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2022, and the auditor's report thereon are hereby placed before the meeting. No vote is required with respect to this matter. We will now proceed with the appointment of the auditors of the company. I would ask someone to move the following resolution, which I will now read. Be it hereby resolved that McGovern Hurley LLP, chartered accountants, be and they are hereby appointed as auditors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are appointed at such remuneration as may be fixed by the Directors and the directors be and they are hereby authorized to fix such remuneration.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Thank you very much. I declare that the resolution appointing the auditors of the company for the ensuing year and authorizing the directors to fix remuneration has been carried. Okay. So we will now proceed with the election of directors of the company for the ensuing year and the management information circular of the company dated May 2, 2023, on Pages 22 to 23. It was indicated that the company will propose the following 4 persons for election as directors. Myself, Dr. Keith M. Barron, Jonathan Kagan, Nathalie Han and Thomas Ullrich. I will now hear a motion nominating these persons as directors of the company for the ensuing year. Jonathan, you have -- you're muted.

I'm sorry. I nominate the aforesaid individuals who are identified in the management information circular of the company dated May 2, 2023 on Pages 22 to 23 to serve as directors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed in accordance with the articles and bylaws of the company.

Thank you. Are there any further nominations? If not, we'll proceed. Since there are no further nominations, I hereby declare the nominations closed. I have been advised by the scrutineer that the proxies deposited for the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the directors, and I would ask someone to move the following resolution, which I will now read. We had hereby resolve that the 4 persons nominated by management to be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed in accordance with the articles and bylaws of the company.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Thank you. I declare that the resolution to elect Dr. Keith M. Barron, Jonathan Kagan, Nathalie Han and Thomas Ullrich as Directors of the company, to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed has been carried. We will now proceed with the ordinary resolution approving the company's Incentive Stock Option Plan as described on Pages 24 and 25 of the Management Information Circular under the heading Approval of Option Plan for upcoming year. A description of the stock option plan is set out on Pages 18 to 20 under the heading Securities authorized for issuance under equity compensation plans, 10% rolling stock option plan, and the full text of the plan is set out on Pages A1 to A8 of the Management Information Circular under the heading Schedule A Stock Option Plan. Certain amendments were made to the stock option plan to conform with the TSX Venture Exchange's policies and the full text of the plan may be provided to any shareholder who requests same from the Secretary. This resolution is an ordinary resolution that requires approval of at least a majority of the votes casted thereon by the shareholders in person or by proxy at the meeting. The Board of Directors of the company recommends that shareholders vote in favor of this resolution and believes that the passing of this resolution is in the best interest of the company. I would ask someone to move the following resolution, which I will now read. Be it hereby resolved as an ordinary resolution of shareholders of the company, that's, number one, Stock Option Plan B and is hereby ratified, affirmed and approved until the next Annual General Meeting of the company. Number two, the form of the Stock Option Plan may be amended in order to satisfy the requirements or requests of any regulatory authorities or stock option -- stock exchange without requiring further approval of the shareholders of the company. And number three, any one director or officer of the company is hereby authorized and directed for and on behalf of the company, to execute or cause to be executed and to deliver or cause to be delivered all such documents and to do or cause to be done, all such acts and things as such director or officer may deem necessary or desirable in connection with the foregoing resolution.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Thank you. The scrutineer reports that the resolution has been duly carried by a majority of the shareholder votes cast at the meeting, and I accordingly declare the resolution approving the company's Incentive Stock Option Plan has been carried. We will now proceed with the ordinary resolution approving amendments to the company's Restricted Share Unit Plan as described on Page 25 of the Management Information Circular under the heading Amendment of RSU Plan. A description of the Restricted Share Unit Plan is set out on Pages 20 to 21 under the heading Securities Authorized for Issuance Under Equity Compensation Plans, Restricted Share Unit Plan. And the full text of the plan is set out on Pages B1 to B12 of the Management Information Circular under the heading Schedule B Restricted Share Unit Plan. Certain amendments were made to the Restricted Share Unit Plan to conform with the TSX Venture Exchange's policies and the full text of the plan may be provided to any shareholder who requests same from the Secretary. This resolution is an ordinary resolution that requires the approval of at least a majority of the votes cast thereon by the shareholders in person or by proxy at the meeting. The Board of Directors of the company recommends that shareholders vote in favor of this resolution and believes that the passing of this resolution is in the best interest of the company. I would ask someone to move the following resolution, which I will now read. You are hereby resolved as an ordinary resolution of shareholders of the company that: Number one, the amendments to the RSU plan be and is hereby ratified, affirmed and approved. Number two, the form of the RSU Plan may be amended in order to satisfy the requirements of best of any regulatory authorities or stock exchange without requiring further approval of the shareholders of the company. And number three, any one director or officer of the company is hereby authorized and directed for and on behalf of the company to execute the cause to be executed and to deliver a cause to be delivered, all such documents and to do or cause to be done, all such action things as such Director or Officer may deem necessary or desirable in connection with the foregoing resolution.

I so move.

May I have the motion seconded?

I second the motion.

Thank you very much. The scrutineer reports that the resolution has been duly carried by a majority of the shareholder votes cast at the meeting, and I accordingly declare the resolution approving the company's restricted share unit plan has been carried. This concludes the formal business of the meeting as set out in the notice of the meeting. There being no further business to conduct, I will now hear a motion to conclude the meeting.

I move that the meeting be concluded.

I second the motion.

Thank you. I hereby declare the motion carried and the meeting terminated. I wish to thank you for attending. I will now provide a brief update about the company and then address questions as time permits. Okay. We've got the compulsory stuff out of the way here. So what I'm going to do, first, I thought I would give you a bit of an update on what has been happening recently politically in Ecuador because it's very, very important for our company. And then I want to actually read out something that I wrote pretty much 3 years ago now, a plan for developing our copper projects, which I think you'll find very informative and very interesting and then I will comment on potential developments concerning this. So as you no doubt are aware, about 1 month ago, President Guillermo Lasso, the President of Ecuador, did something quite extraordinary that had never been done in the history of Ecuador. He declared something called the [Foreign Language], the cross-death, very, very strange name, but he was coming up. He was within 2 or 3 days of the votes from the National Assembly, the Assemblea on potential impeachments. And -- the certain parties in the country have accused him of corruption. He fervently denies at all. I think that the thing is very, very much politically motivated, but he was coming up for a vote in the Assemblea on this, whether or not he was going to be impeached and removed from power. Now a bit of background, in Ecuador, President Lasso is center right politically. He's a former banker. He ran the Banco, the Guayaquil for many years. He's a very progressive, very, very pro-business, but he won the election by the thinnest of margins, by only 1/10 of 1% against Arauz, who was the candidate -- socialist candidate. And because of that, because the selection was so darn close, it has been very, very difficult for President Lasso to carry out his programs and everything he talked about before he got elected. He's come under just a continuous attack from the opposition party. Firstly, they accused them of fraud in the election. The independent people who were reviewing the election found that there was nothing untoward that happened. He did win fair and square, but by a very, very small margin. And the National Assembly is very much packed with socialists, who are very strongly opposed to Lasso's program. They have been opposing pretty much every piece of legislature that he has promulgated. Even and bizarrely a piece of legislation against pedophiles. It's bizarre, but anything that he brings to the table gets pushed away by the opposition party. It's made the country quite ungovernable. And last June, we did have problems in the country. We had people taking to the streets. There was violence. There were 11 people killed unfortunately. But a lot of this was -- it was found later on, it was actually orchestrated and paid for by people outside the country, who are affiliated with the socialists. They were paying Venezuelan illegals in the country to essentially throw bottles and stones, Molotov cocktails and cause a big ruckus. Anyway, that ended a long time ago. But one of the things that President Lasso did to put an end to the violence was making agreements with the 2 indigenous groups, indigenous -- they -- well, they claim to represent all the indigenous people in the country. They're called CONAIE [indiscernible]. And he agreed not to reopen the mining Cadastre, the mining registry until such time that a new law was introduced, which it's called the Prior Consultation Law. And of course, what happened was that the assembly blocked the Prior Consultation Law and it became obvious that for the rest of Lasso's term, they would continue to block that law even though they were in favor of it just to keep the cadastral closed and to keep Lasso essentially off balance. So when Lasso declared the special condition months ago, immediately the assembly was dissolved. And Lasso since then has been ruling essentially by decree. And that situation will maintain until the national elections are held. It could have been as much as 6 months, but apparently he brought it forward. The elections will be held in August. If there's a runoff and there probably will be, the second round of elections would be in October. And I would think that the new government wouldn't take their seats until January of next year. I don't have any exact information on that. But in any case, what Lasso has done over the last month now, essentially over the last 2 weeks, is pushed through a number of things that were continuously blocked by the National Assembly. One of them was a law to do with environmental permits to operate mining projects. There were 3 projects, Cangrejos, which is owned by Lumina. Mirador Norte, which is owned by the Chinese and [ Caripampa, ] which is owned by [ Freddie Salazar, ] and they had been all hung up for about a year, maybe even more than a year, and the permits were not getting anywhere. They were just blocked. He cleared out the red tape -- cut the red tape and now these things have got the green light and they will be going ahead and they will be built. And Lasso, as you probably know, the main tenets of this whole program has been that oil production will no longer sustain economy of the country and that it should be and could be mining that essentially propels the country forward and even takes the country from the third world to maybe the second world. I think it's quite possible, but it needs somebody who can -- who's a visionary and who's also going to push things through. The other thing that he did, I believe there's 2 tax reports that he's -- that were blocked for a long, long time, and he's pushed that through, so that Ecuador can benefit from international trade. So until the election comes or maybe when the new government takes power, I don't know what the situation is exactly. I'm not a student of Ecuadorian law. But Lasso has the rights to push through certain parts of this program without continuous debate and without a lot of opposition from -- really from anybody. So that's very important for what I'm going to read out to you now. Now this is a document, I tweaked it a little bit, but it's 3 years old. Bear with me because I'm going to read it out. And there's stuff in here that I think you'll find quite interesting. And it actually will explain to a large extent what Aurania resources program has been for the last 5, almost 6 years now. So this was a copper concept paper that was sent to the Board on the 11th of June 2020, so 3 years ago. Aurania Resources Limited secured a land package of circa 500,000 acres, 208,000 hectares in Southeast Ecuador and has made an unprecedented discovery over the last 3 years of a new and previously unknown copper porphyry belt, extending for 65 miles and a copper-silver near surface deposit, which extends for more than 14 miles, 23 kilometers. Within the region and close by, there is one producing copper mine, that's Mirador as well as 2 unmined deposits with large reserves and discovery by Solaris of a cluster of 6 porphyries [indiscernible]. They just announced the sixth porphyry this morning actually. The grades of these deposits are similar to those being currently mined in British Columbia, the Western U.S.A. and Chile. This part of Ecuador lacks critical transportation and energy infrastructure, which has hampered development until now. However, the new discoveries are on a scale that was never previously imagined and could conceivably catapult Ecuador into a major copper-producing country within as little as 10 years with projects that might have a mine life of 30, 50 or even 100 years. We believe that there is now critical mass to justify the infrastructure build to access these currently economically stranded deposits. In fact, there may be sufficient resources to contemplate building of a smelter/hydromet plant to produce refined copper. Significant value can be added at this time to make Aurania's project irresistible for any major to acquire or participate in joint venture. I wrote this 3 years ago. This is equivalent to walking into the Chilean copper belt in the 1930s and having it all. With the projected copper renaissance is coming as a result of EVs and other green power projects, there is potential here to create dynastic wealths. That means the kind of wealth that you can hang on to your children and grandchildren. Aurania Resources Limited discovered new and hitherto unknown copper province driving the border area of Ecuador and Peru. The Ecuador Peru Copper provinces, as we are calling it, is composed of 2 interrelated but very different types of copper mineralization, and it's important to understand what these are early in the discussion, so the opportunity can be properly evaluated. The first, we will term the critical Condor copper porphyry belts. The second, we will turn the [indiscernible], the copper road, which is a near or at surface mineralization type and find within sediment layers. For me, they're both very much related. This is the fun part here. It is proposed that Aurania spins out a copper-focused company called [ Danconia ] Copper Corporation Limited. This is named after the fictional world's greatest copper company, "world's greatest copper company" in the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, which was published in 1957. Danconia is usually based on the Anaconda Copper Company now defunct. Anaconda was started by Marcus Daly in the age of the copper kings when electrification was being introduced to America and Europe. The Guggenheim fortune with American Smelting and Refining company, also known as ASARCO, was created at the same time. Today, we are on the brink of another copper renaissance as the world moves away from petrol-driven cars, and coal-fired electricity plants to electric vehicles and renewables such as solar and wind power. All of these require access to massive resources of copper, which is close to deficit supply worldwide. Our project to provide the world with sustainable copper resources for many decades to come and be a major part of the green solution to global warming. Now a bit of history here. May 5, 2020 saw the passing -- now this was like a month -- I wrote this a month later. So the passing of legendary geologists, J. David Lowell at the age of 92. Lowell was credited with 17 major mineral deposit discoveries during his career and was the co-author of the seminal paper on porphyry copper deposits in 1970, which revolutionized copper exploration. Lowell was a big picture thinker. In 1973, he developed what he called the covered area project in pretty much the entire states of Arizona and New Mexico, and when the objective of finding a porphyry copper ore body, it was initially funded by Newmont, then by Hanna Mining, Getty and [ Biletin, ] using the model of concentric shelves, alteration around copper porphyry, which he have developed, [indiscernible] for altered rock in likely areas and then extrapolated where the alteration would be centered in the predicted copper porphyry mass. In most of the areas exposure with less than 50% and they had to use a RAB drill, which is a rotary air blast drill to look not for mineralization, but for altered rock, so that they could vector into the ore body. Most of the area was covered in gravels hiding the geology. Lowell located plenty targets using this method and drilled them with 120 holes, and they were all duds. The 21st target, though proved to be the Casa Grande West copper ore body. The discovery came in 1977, so that's 4 years after they started and the discovery cost was USD 2 million from inception, which is a very big budget for the time. Casa Grande came in at 400 million tons at 1% copper and was a big win but it's mining ran into opposition. Many years later, it is finally being developed as a mine by Robert Freedom, whom I'm sure you all know. At the back of his success at Casa Grande, Lowell in 1978 struck out on an extremely ambitious plan. He decided to prospect the belt of rocks in Chile, 500 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide, at 17,500 square kilometers using the alteration vector approach to the Chilean copper belt. This was funded by Utah Mines, which later became part of Bhp and Getty Minerals. The budget was $1.5 million a year for 3 years. A total of 1 million hectares, 1 million hectares was staked along the 500-kilometer belts and 160,000 meters of RAB drilling was carried out before Escondida was discovered after drilling 4 dud targets. The program also located El Tosoro, an exotic copper discovery and Zaldivar, at present being mined by Barrick in Antofagasta. The search area was 50% covered by alluvium or younger cover rocks. Escondida was discovered in the seventh drill hole on the target and the exploration on the ground was initiated January 1979 and Escondida was found in March 1981, pretty fast. Escondida is currently the largest copper mine in the world. Now my story, in January 2001, Dr. Keith Barron initiated gold and copper exploration in the Condor belt of Ecuador, initially funded out of the hip pocket until the venture was taken public, in June 2003, [indiscernible] Resources. Barron was impressed by the high level of activity of artisanal alluvial gold mining in the border area with Peru. He built out a landholding of 96,000 hectares, knowing like Lowell that the chances of discovery of a mine on a postage stamp property base were statistically very low. Discovery came in March 2006 with the finding of the Fruta del Norte gold silver ore body worth over $20 billion at current metal prices. The company was purchased by Kinross Gold for CAD 1.2 billion in 2008, and the deposit is now in production by Lundin Gold. Approximately CAD 14 million was spent from 2001 to Discovery. The critical takeaway here is that large-scale exploration can be extremely rewarding, but the time frame for exploration is measured in years, not months. They are also expensive ventures and cannot be successful if starved funding. Very few companies engaged in this type of exploration usually lack staying power, access to funding or imagination and determination, but the payoff with success can be enormous. In March 2016, Barron set out on the second ambitious plan to acquire the heart of the Cutucú belts, north of the Condor Belt where the previous FDN discovery had been made. This would cover the historic area of the lost cities and the projected trend of the copper belt northwards. This area was almost entirely unexplored with no pre-existing database. It was a decade in the making before staking took place. Lots and lots of research done and visiting the project. So here's a bunch of stuff that I'm sure most of you do not know. Of an initial application area, well, let's wind it back a little bit. So there had been a moratorium on staking new ground. The cadastral was closed in Ecuador for 8 years. And it was opened miraculously in 2016 at the PDAC, the Prospectors and Developers meeting in Toronto, by Javier Cordova, the Minister of Mines at the time. So he announced it on Tuesday at a cocktail party held by the Ministry of Mines. And at 12:01 the next morning, essentially middle of the night, the areas became open for staking. I was fully prepared and had been working with my VP Exploration, Jean-Paul. And at 12:01, we banged in the concessions, and we banged in 400,000 hectares, 400,000 essentially million acres. The next day, Javier Cordova, the minister, came to me in the morning and he said, Keith, I can't give you 400,000. We have a national election coming up. And he said we might be accused of all kinds of different things, just 400,000 is politically inexpedient at this time. Would you take 100,000? And I said, sir, with all due respect, if it's only 100,000, I'm not going to do it, I'll take my money to another country. And he said, no, no, no, please don't do that. We will settle on 200,000. Eventually, we ended up with 208,000 and we had, myself and Jean-Paul had 4 days to select that 208,000 out of the 400,000 with very, very little information. We had not done a full geological program on the ground. Obviously, we didn't own the property, so it would have been -- it would have been impossible. So Javier Cordova told me, he said the other 200,000, he will place in reserve status, called [Foreign Language] and it will show up on the Internet as [Foreign Language] and you can proceed with those concessions, maybe in 6 months' time, 12 months' time, we'll give you the signal. And I said, well, that sounds very fair, sir. Let's do that. So we proceeded. We managed to get the 208,000, started our exploration. But because I had been given these verbal guarantees from the minister, the very first thing we did on the project was actually fly geophysical survey, an airborne survey, for our magnetics and radio metrics over the entire 400,000 hectares block, even though we only owned 208,000. Believing that we would eventually get the whole lot, I risked the money, spent about $1 million and got this done. Now what happened was unfortunate, fortunate in a way and unfortunate in other ways. Halfway through the survey being done, the geophysicists, who was working for us, who was processing the data, Jeremy Brett here in Toronto, phoned up myself and said, Keith, you have to get over to my office. So I went with Richard Spencer. And we looked at his computer screen, and we almost fell over. Because we were so absolutely bowled over with a number of targets that appeared on the magnetic survey, well over 100 porphyry targets -- well over 100 porphyry targets. So I mean, we didn't open any champagne, but we certainly felt like celebrating because here, nobody had this kind of data, nobody had this data, and we thought this would be a very early win for Aurania and its shareholders. Unfortunately, what happened was that the 6 months turned into 1 year, turned into 1.5 years. Still on reserve status, still on the Internet, still listed on the Cadastral and then Fernando Benalcazar became the Minister of Mines, and he declared another moratorium on the Cadastral and canceled the reserve status areas, not just for us but for other companies as well. We immediately put in a challenge with a judge. It's still in place. And since then, over the last 5 years, I have continuously lobbied the Ecuadorian government, spoken with everyone right up to the President to get this matter resolved and to get this land back for our shareholders. Now the reason that I'm sharing all this with you today is because 5 years has gone by, we have had more than 10 major companies in the data room over the last 5 years. None of them wanted to sign a confidentiality and noncompete agreements for more than 3 years. And so some of those agreements have unfortunately expired. And the cadastral is still not open. So now they have an odd thing in law in Ecuador that when you release a concession, you have to do an exit environmental study to just show that there are no hazards left behind. Because the -- until recently, the environmental ministry was very hostile towards mining, they still, to this date, have not approved any of these exit programs and they've been sitting there for over a year and not ourselves but other companies have faced with having to pay for patentes even though these are properties that they intended to drop. And they notified the government that they were dropping, but the damn surveys have not been approved by the environmental ministry. President Lasso realized that this was a problem. He removed the minister of the environments, but he's politically very powerful. He sent him over to the Ministry of the Interior and the situation really did not improve for anyone, except very, very recently now, and as I told you, he's cut through the red tape to allow 3 mining projects to go ahead. So we're in a situation now where we have -- we're into our sixth year of exploration. I would love to see this thing resolved. However, the next government is going to take power probably in January of next year. I'm 61 years of age. And that 6 months represents over 5% of the rest of my working life if I decide to retire at the age of 70. Maybe I'll go on and like David Lowell, well, well into my upper 80s. I don't know. Let's see what I'm blessed by God with. But in any case, there is something called opportunity costs. I have put more than $20 million into this company. I own 43% of the equity and I want to make the money back. And so I am going to push through, push with -- continue pushing with the governments to get this resolved. Now the government did, over the last 8 months, develop a plan to work around the cadastral. I can't share that plan with you today. But the plan has not been enacted by any company because it was believed that the assembly would shut the whole thing down. Of course, there is no assembly right now. So there is a piece of time right now when potentially Lasso's government can get this done. And I really do believe that this is the last and potentially the best frontier area left in not just the South American, but the whole of the South American and North American [indiscernible] porphyry copper. We already know that the [indiscernible] sedimentary-hosted copper there too. I believe that they're all linked. And I want Aurania to be the benefit of this. However, I'm not pitting the survival of Aurania on this. And I can tell you that since last November, I have been working on 2 other initiatives. I'm not able to discuss them today. They are outside of Ecuador, in a different country. And I have a plan A, I have a plan B and a plan C and it's not like if A doesn't work, then I go on to B. A, B and C are all in the works. So I wanted to share that with you. And just to finish, so Aurania is engaged in its own covered areas project in Ecuador since the magnetic targets generated lie within an area mapped as all sentiments by the governments. And of course, it's all covered by jungle as well. The majority are buried or poorly outcropped. It will now be a fairly straightforward and simple task to drill these porphyry targets and adjacent mineralized shales. The search defined multiple economic ore zones, have now considerably derisked and judged to have a high likelihood of success. The project can now be rapidly advanced to the discovery phase in 6 months or less. Now I wrote this 3 years ago, and I had been promised by the Ecuadorian government that cadastral was going to be opening within 2 months. And of course, it didn't. And I want to stress yet again, we do not own the reserved areas. We applied for them. We still have a legal challenge out there, and we're endeavoring to get them back, but we do not have them right now, even though it's full of magnetic targets that we believe, some of them are going to be porphyry. We know that we ground check some of them. We've been walking over them, we know that they're porphyry. And this is the reason why I've kept this property intact. There's a law as well if you walk away from a piece of land here in Ecuador without doing your environmental survey, your exit survey, you cannot acquire any new land for 2 years. Now since knowing that none of these damn things have been approved really since 2016, I had no choice but to pay all the Potentes for all of the land and keep the property intact because I was continuously informed by the Ministry that the cadastral would be opening imminently. And this thing was sitting there like a golden apple to be plugged, right? And I owe it to the shareholders to follow through with this as well as I could. So we still have hope of doing this. We are still talking to major companies. Of course, the major companies, and I've talked to over 10 of them and they've been in the data room, they've all said and they're privy to this information. I'm not making the magnetic survey public, by the way. But they've all seen it and they've all said, you get that land and you've got a joint venture. Well, we don't have the land, but hopefully, we're going to get it. So that's kind of my update. And I suppose if anybody has any questions right now, they can fire away.

Okay. Terry? Do any of you have a question? Well, legally, I'm only allowed to tell you what has been in the last financials. 350. Don't worry about this, right? I have got 43% of this company. I have been carrying the company. I will continue to carry the company. And as I told you and everybody else, I'm working on 2 other initiatives. And as I told a shareholder last week, I said, I didn't just fall off the turnup truck, right? This company has got more than 2,000 shareholders who spread all over the earth. And if Ecuador is not going to work because of the politics and maybe it won't, I have got Plan B and Plan C, which I will be rolling out. I'm not letting this thing augur Into the ground. Not owning 43% of it.

Will there be drilling in Ecuador in the fall? Or is that still contingent I thought I read in a recent presentation on land that [indiscernible]...

Well, there could be if it's funded. I had one very major company, I can't say who they are, but they were meant to send 6 geologists to the project 2 days ago. On the day that Lasso declared this [ Mortis Crucis. ] He said, he called it off indefinitely, his due diligence meeting. They had been in the due diligence in the virtual due diligence room for 2 months. And I had met with them twice given the presentations personally. So they -- he cited that there might be potential for violence. There hasn't been any violence at all. And in fact, everyone is just working towards campaigning right now because the election is coming up in August. So that's the situation. It's -- certainly, I'm in contact with them, and I am in contact with other parties as well. But this project is at a stage now where it means drilling. There are multiple targets, all the heavy lifting has been done, and I need a major to come in and fund it. And the potential, this morning, Solaris announced 6 porphyries, #6 porphyry at [ Marinza. ] We think we could have a similar sort of situation at the [ Watcha. ] Certainly, it's a cluster, but we need the money to drill.

Resorts might go to the southern plan.

Yes, but not in the short term. Yes. And those are things that are not costing money at the moment. Okay. Okay. Ralph Leishman? Hello Ralph. Great to hear from you. What's the relationship between the Shuar on our property and CONAIE? Well, I've spoken to the Shuar leaders on our projects, and they do not recognize CONAIE as representing them. They are very much autonomous when it suits them. And I've had discussions with them. They are -- most of their members are in deep poverty. We've been the only source of employment for them. And they want us to continue to keep working. And moreover, both CONAIE and [indiscernible] had come to us and said that we have to hire our people through them and then they distribute the money. And of course, the local people know exactly what that means. They take their cuts or maybe they don't even get paid at all. So they're furious about it. And so we continue to have a very good relationship with them. Still doing lots of programs through my private foundation, clean water programs, and we're doing a small program right now, kind of entrepreneurialism, so that some of the ladies, members of our communities can sell their crafts. They're very adept at beadwork and things like that. Okay. Any other? Terry, if you're back? No. Okay. Well, whoever is on the call, my e-mail is [email protected]. If you have any questions for me for the questions or you want something clarified, by all means, please go ahead and fire me off an e-mail, and I will endeavor to answer it best as I can. And good luck to you. Good luck to us and God bless, and thank you so much for your participation, and thanks for support to the company. Goodbye for now.