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Addressed fully in 26521.
Here's a good one. He quit posting here in June of 2014, about the same time DigiTech quit. Maybe he was a paid shill after all. It's hard to see how anyone could be so delusional. I could never find any link between him and the company though.
mjkiii Tuesday, 06/03/14 08:02:13 PM
Re: None
Post #
25492
of 26529 Go
Watching the moaning and hand wringing.
Very pleased with how the BOD is leading us out of this difficult time. Better times and profitability coming right on schedule per last PR. Brazil beat Panama 4-0 today, but that was a 'friendly'. Brazil is a great place, you should watch them carefully.
Richard is doing a fine job and will continue to lead the company for many years. It is not my fault that many here do not have any idea of actual events and future plans. Just howling at the moon with no idea of what is going on with your company.
Kind of fun to watch the confusion in a perverse sort of way, I guess. Still buying, still happy, still seeing a great future. If you do not like the way the company is run then sell. But, don't go away...we want you to witness the future.
You need money to play a high stakes game and definitely some intestinal fortitude!! Only sound advice I saw today was advice to buy FQM stock. Now that I agree with wholeheartedly.
Do you remember how MegaJocksnifferIII was always vacationing in Europe on first class tickets and going to pick up the private plane he'd just bought and all that? Well, the other day for the fun of it I looked him up and found what appears to be a current address outside of New Orleans. It is a shabby little one car garage house in a run down area. I don't think he had any link to Petaquilla at all and most likely is just a lunatic.
He did have a home up in Arenosa at one point, maybe he still does, but I asked around of people I know who live up there and no one has ever heard of him. There aren't that many gringos up there so it strikes me as very unusual for a gringo to go unnoticed in a place like that.
Strong faith in management! We're not selling until it reaches $7! I'm going to pass my holdings along to my grandchildren!
My group and I are adding to our position every week! I have complete faith in management!
http://www.prensa.com/in_english/petaquilla-contamination_21_4259034057.html
The conflict between the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (Mici) and the company Petaquilla Gold, a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Petaquilla Minerals, has now entered a new stage.
In December 2013, Petaquilla stopped the extraction of gold at the Molejon mine in Colón due to a lack of economic resources. The mine has since been abandoned.
Last week, Petaquilla Gold presented an action plan that included maintenance work in the area where mining takes place.
In addition to environmental issues, Petaquilla Gold needs to make back payments to its workers and pay royalties to the state.
Jorge Obón, a spokesman for Petaquilla Gold, ensures that the company has complied with nearly 100 percent of the financial and environmental demands that it received from the government.
Furthermore, he said the company has someone who is willing to invest enough to cover all debts to creditors, workers and the government.
"We sent a letter asking for a meeting with Minister Melitón Arrocha to submit the credentials of the new investor," stressed Obón.
The ministry said that Arrocha is out of the country, but will be back at the end of the week. At that time he will act on the issue.
The suspension of operations has affected 604 employees, according to the Ministry of Labor. They are owed about $8 million in back wages.
The company faces the cancellation of its concession if it does not rectify the situation.
- See more at: http://www.prensa.com/in_english/petaquilla-contamination_21_4259034057.html#sthash.ZUULJ9Te.dpuf
There was an article out yesterday about Fifer's buying Iberia cheap and then selling it to us high. It's nothing we didn't already know but getting this in print and out there may help get this disgusting filth off the street and in jail where he belongs.
Original article here:
http://laestrella.com.pa/panama/nacional/mina-romana-diluyo-acciones-petaquilla/23867248
English translation (choppy) of the main part of the piece here:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Flaestrella.com.pa%2Fpanama%2Fnacional%2Fmina-romana-diluyo-acciones-petaquilla%2F23867248&edit-text=&act=url
I strongly support management! I buy shares regularly! I won't sell for less than $7!
I don't know because I don't have a sense of how regularly the searchable database gets updated. It could be that there's no such company; it could be that the company is registered and functional but does not yet appear in the database. My wild guess is that the former scenario is more likely.
I just did another public registry search:
No se encontró nada igual o superior a Valor: ARENISCA
I'm traveling and not in Panama at the moment but the minute I hear something I'll share it.
One of the articles that I read earlier in the week seemed to imply that the workers don't really have any other alternatives which is one reason why they are so bent out of shape. I don't know anything about local labor law but it could be that they are contracted to the mine and other employers won't hire them because of that.
I feel quite certain that if this new group demonstrates some good faith in paying back wages and social security and then says, 'Hey, show up on Monday at 8 and let's crank this thing back up' then that's what they'll do. Money talks, and if they pay that should speak plenty loud enough.
Now, what happens with all of the skilled mining professionals, the Spanish, Chilean, Peruvian veterans that they had doing the high-level work who presumably have many other employment options I do not know.
You'd have to go back to the sixties and the Chiari administration to find any regime that was remotely clean. The dictatorship changed the political culture tremendously and many of the connected people here now Fifer's age and older had ties to the dictatorship.
But I see a very real public will to address and hopefully change the culture of corruption. The PAN scandal is appalling to most everyone, the canal expansion is a joke, there are serious questions about the bidding on the now completed first line of the metro. Lots of corrupt former officials are going down. We'll see if this is simply score settling or the beginning of real change.
CarlOS soy, but you're very welcome. I just hope that my take is somewhere in the vicinity of correct. The idea that Fifer will have some adult supervision is leaving me more encouraged about all this than I have been in a long time.
There is real value in this company. The people who've robbed it blind must be booted out, of course, and hopefully jailed. Just today came the news that Alejandro Moncada Luna, a bent former Supreme Court justice, was found guilty of his sundry crimes and sentenced to five years in prison. There is (much) more of this to come. The Martinelli administration left a tidal wave of corrupt politicians washed up into the various halls of justice. Oddly enough, the keepers of these halls of justice seem to have awakened in the mood to do something about the egregious violations of the public trust and the public purse manifested by so many of the former administration.
Sadly, Fifer is a political chameleon and I doubt he'll be seen as a Martinelli loyalist. (Despite MJKuijote's constant insistence - wrong, of course - that Fifer was a founder of the Cambio Democrático.) So he may be down on the list of people for Varela to go after. But who knows? My dream is a functioning, profitable mine and lazy Sundays at La Joya visiting Tío Richard. And, of course, a debilitating lawsuit aimed at the former BOD.
From what I can gather Arenisca - a company apparently so new that they aren't even in the Public Registry yet, at least I couldn't find them - is formed equally by Petaquilla and Baseline Financial. The management of the mine will be handled by Arenisca rather than by Petaquilla or Baseline individually.
If I understand this correctly I read this as very good news. Baseline should have significant input into the day to day management of the mine and Fifer should not be left alone to mismanage it grossly like he's done for years.
What does it mean that they closed their office? I don't know, probably that they don't have any money. I already told you months ago that the PDI offices were closed. PDI, of course, was supposed to be a cash cow selling aggregate to the copper mine. When the relationship with FQM went south apparently so did PDI. We were told by the usual suspects that PDI had plenty of work beyond the copper mine to keep it busy and profitable. I guess that was a miscalculation. I wonder what they did with all the heavy equipment they were leasing. I wonder if it's still at the mine or if it was repossessed or what. I sure would like to know what if anything is going on at the mine. Unfortunately, unlike the various offices, the mine's not something you can just drive by and check on. I mean, you can drive to it but they have a security guy standing there checking IDs and so on. But wait! They probably didn't pay that guy, either! You can probably just drive right in!
I drove by the offices in the Panama City this morning. Or, I should say, the former offices. They are now abandoned and have a cheerful "For Rent" sign hanging in the window.
They are in fact in the Registro Publico. The company was registered in May of last year and its director appears to be a twenty-something administrative assistant at a sugar production company in Chiriquí. It is not unusual to obscure corporate structure by nominating peripheral individuals as corporate officers. We've discussed that before. So I guess it is possible that some sugar baron is going to throw Fifer a lifeline. But I'm still as confused as ever as to why anyone would loan $25MM to a company with a market cap of $5MM. I think tomorrow I'll go down to the bank and take out a thirty million dollar mortgage on my house, see how that goes.
Anyway, I did some looking around at the people involved in this company to see if I could find any recognizable names or interesting relationships. Nothing so far, but I didn't spend too much time at it.
So, according to Google, outside of Petaquilla these guys simply do not exist:
No results found for "baseline financial group sa" -petaquilla.
I'll check the Panama public registry later but I doubt they'll show up there, either.
At this point I'm almost more annoyed that Fifer thinks people will fall for this nonsense than at the outrageous abuse of shareholder value these idiots have engineered.
This is plainly another tactic meant to stall the inevitable process of dismantling the company. It's no different from their idiotically transparent ploy to claim that some used car salesman from Calle Ocho would cough up sixty million or whatever it was to keep this scam afloat. Worse, some people here who consider themselves insiders ate it up. These guys have done their due diligence! they said. Incredible. How about YOU do some due diligence before you claim to know what's going on. Because you obviously are clueless. Or, who knows, maybe you're part of the scam, too.
My main consolation is that Varela is seriously going after Martinelli and all of the CD crooks. He needs a few things to fall his way before he has a clear path to put these goons in jail but he may get there. Fifer of course will find himself in Varela's crosshairs. Maybe he'll join the others in a local prison.
By the way, remember mjk's intense pride at Fifer's CD pedigree? He's a founding member of CD! (Not true, of course.) Hopefully Fifer's political affiliation will be the last straw that will get this disgusting reptile sent away.
No, mjk is a jock sniffing clown who has a lake house here in Panama. Maybe he even spends time in it, who knows. I have no idea what his actual connection is with Petaquilla if in fact he has any. He obviously knew precious little about the enterprise. And as far as I've ever been able to determine he is not connected in any formal or semi-formal way to the company. I doubt very seriously if he is in any way a major shareholder. As I've mentioned, he's a jock sniffer. All the time when he was proclaiming that My group strongly supports management and is buying shares regularly!!! the volume was no more than several thousand shares a day.
We own eleventy billion shares and won't sell at a penny less than seven dollars! Petaquilla es pura paja!!!
Then again maybe he's got millions of shares and is even dumber than I thought.
But yeah, I doubt that he was any sort of a paid shill. Someone like Fifer would likely consider that kind of activity unrewarding. My guess is that he's simply delusional.
One thing I do know that I'll share here - the Petaquilla employee that I know best (not a friend as such but someone I'd be happy to say hello to if I ran into him on the street, and someone who'd ordinarily be happy in turn to see me), this guy is burning up his LinkedIn page with new skills. It's almost as if he thinks he'll have to be looking for a job soon.
I have no idea if he's any good at what he does. In fact, I have no idea WHAT he does. He may not do anything. Hence the new LinkedIn skills. Maybe he didn't need to demonstrate any skills at Petaquilla. He's a member of Richard's extended family, so make of that what you will.
It infuriates me that management would at best insult its shareholders and the investing public with an obviously nonsensical story about financing that anyone with Google and ten minutes of free time could plainly see was pure fantasy. It was so obviously nonsense that I didn't even bother asking my connected associates what they knew about it.
It annoys me that some connected people who post here acted as though the financing were real. That shows either continued faith in management which is to me a sign of delusion or it demonstrates intentional deception.
You could explain the basic mechanics to a four year old and he would know that it's ridiculous. No one is going to give $60MM or $120MM or whatever the invented number was in financing to a company worth ten million dollars. That is simply ludicrous on its face and again I find it deeply insulting that the company would suggest such a risible fantasy as reality.
I do not doubt that there are plenty of people who would be happy to finance further operations because with competent management the company could be quite profitable. But clearly the first (and perhaps only) condition of financing would be that Fifer resign any involvement in the concern.
I haven't done any formal calculations but from looking at the charts I don't think that there has been nearly enough volume over the last year to indicate that the several principal institutional holders could have liquidated their shares. So I assume there is still some significant institutional ownership, and there is certainly still some significant local ownership. So it is not irrational to remain hopeful. But I would like management to knock off the dog ate my homework bit and I would like to see ostensibly informed investors not fall for that sort of patently absurd slapstick going forward.
You think that the company is going to get $120MM from a used car dealer? I know you don't, and judging by the SP neither does anyone else. Apparently that includes members of the BOD who, if I read the story correctly, were aligning themselves to unload whatever shares they still have.
There has been quite a bit of press down here lately about the alleged insider trading of PTQ shares by a holding company (registered in Denmark, of all places) controlled, allegedly, by the most recent ex-President. He claimed, cleverly, I suppose, that it is not illegal to trade with privileged information in Panama if you're trading shares registered in Canada. Maybe he's right but the new Panamanian administration does not seem to see things his way and I doubt the Canadians will, either. The entire mess is quite sordid - there's a seemingly crooked brokerage house, a belly-up credit union, a securities commission official who was investigating this whole thing who has disappeared, another who was stabbed in an attack that happened outside the office of the brokerage... According to local reports the insider information was provided by another ex-BOD, Ferrer.
Anyway, what we see on the surface, that the mine's closed, the company's broke and the employees are owed three and a half million dollars, may just be the tip of a very ugly iceberg.
But I support management! My group is still buying shares weekly!*
*I thought I'd do that because we haven't heard it in a while.
Manuel and Sirotinsky prohibited by the BC regulators from any transaction in Petaquilla shares:
http://www.prensa.com/impreso/economia/canada-le-pone-freno-directivos-petaquilla/420033
I don't understand why you're so worked up over things the company did, wisely, in my view, to ensure good relations with the surrounding community but don't ever mention the recent allegations that Fifer funneled who knows how much money through the foundation to his personal interests, his restaurant, his horses, who knows what else.
If those allegations are true then they're certainly criminal and actionable. Building a water plant or a school so that the locals don't sabotage our operations seems like a smart move to me. Stealing money to fund a lavish lifestyle - allegedly - not really.
The company's worth exactly what the market says it's worth.
Of course the company is potentially worth more if they can ever get it together to begin producing gold again but the market seems fairly doubtful, doesn't it?
I'm still waiting for any sort of evidence that these two guys have anything close to the $60MM that they will allegedly invest. One of them runs a used car lot on Calle Ocho and the other one lives in a $300,000 house in Pembroke Pines. That's not exactly the sort of duo that would have a $650MM portfolio of anything or would have scores of millions of dollars sitting around to invest in someone like Fifer. In fact, any sane person who would invest that sort of money in this enterprise would certainly do so on the condition that Fifer discontinue his involvement.
The deal as it's being presented is very, very suspect. The ten cent share price and the twenty million market cap clearly reflect this.
It has occurred to me to wonder why someone would loan sixty million dollars to a company whose market cap is twenty million.
Power Blue has $650MM of assets related to gold mines in Peru yet they carve out the free time to be able to dabble in rice imports:
http://m.ec21.com/mobile/bDetails.jsp?offerId=23513107
And cornmeal!:
http://m.ec21.com/mobile/bDetails.jsp?offerId=23514290
They have their mining operation running so smoothly that they can afford to diversify! Now that's the sort of efficiency I'm after!
Maybe that million dollars they were looking for is slated for a large cornmeal purchase because the sixty million they had lying around is obviously earmarked for other things.
Where did you find the address? I looked at the press release in various places and the Imppetrol address was not listed in anything I saw. If you could point me to the release you're looking at I'd appreciate it.
What we know is that the two new board members are Jose Miranda of Imppetrol, the supposed source of this $60MM and Felix Salas of Power Blue, LLC, an "affiliate" of Imppetrol.
If you google around for a minute or two you'll find that Jose Miranda owns several small-time car dealerships under the corporate name Mi Patria Motors. The green hut is next door to Miranda's used car lot. If you zoom in you can see that the address of the lot is 3160.
http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Miami/imppetrol-investment-inc/101097948.aspx
He seems to have another used car lot at 333 NW 79th Street in case you're looking for a deal:
http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Miami/mi-patria-motors-llc/36330554.aspx
As for Power Blue, I can find several legitimate looking addresses for them, locations that are plainly places of business, and from the wiki they look more legitimate than Imppetrol:
http://www.corporationwiki.com/Florida/Pembroke-Pines/power-blue-llc/36008176.aspx
And they have a website, sort of:
http://www.powerblueenter.com/2.html
But look around a bit more and you find that at some point in the recent past they were looking for a line of credit of $1MM:
http://www.tradekey.com/company/Power-Blue-LLC-2183635.html
So I'm left wondering who the hell are these guys and how am I supposed to believe that a used car dealer and a guy who's out panhandling for a million dollars can suddenly come up with sixty million? What's going on here?
I mean, Red Kite, sure, they are a known concern that has a history of funding mining operations. But these guys? Come on. I'd like to see some hard evidence that they have anything close to the money that they say they will invest in Petaquilla.
So today I took a little ride out to the Petaquilla and PDI offices. The PDI office is in La Pintada and the Petaquilla office is in between Penonomé and La Pintada. (Petaquilla has another office in the city. My impression is that most of the higher-level employees report to the office in the city.)
The sign on the door of what was once the PDI offices says it all.
The formerly busy PDI offices.
The formerly busy loading dock of the warehouse that stored basic materials for the mine.
This by the way is the handsome exterior of the building, a structure I once praised and MJK said was "just a building." He'd plainly never even been there.
And then here is the parking lot of the administrative office. The sign reserving the space on the left reads 'Presidencia.'
I am satisfied about how things are transpiring and support management.
I thought surely I would have to go back more than a week to find this sort of quote. Of course we've all seen the scores of posts where he affirms that he "strongly supports management." Why anyone would support a management team with what could charitably be called an abysmal track record is anyone's guess. I mentioned once a while back that he reminds me of people I know who rub shoulders with someone once and spin that into being some sort of confident, some sort of insider. It's a pathology, I suppose, no different from constantly being a contrarian. It's probably two sides of the same coin.
And now the new theme is to rail against the one guy who is willing to share with us his efforts to do something about this fiasco. There are a number of factions here in Panama and elsewhere who are organizing to give Mr Fifer all the time he needs to improve the food at his restaurant. GI is willing to share with us some aspects of his (very real) efforts to do the same. Many of us are deeply appreciative both of the effort and of the aim. A few are happy to ridicule him. That's too bad.
The mockers are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history one way or another. Either the company will go bankrupt on the backs of this "strongly supported" management team or those responsible for this disaster will be replaced and held accountable and the company will thus be given an opportunity once again to grow. Those really are the only two options.
In Panama about 20 or 30 families run everything. (None of them is named Fifer.) MJK has said many times, quite correctly, that a huge amount of shares are owned locally by Panamanians through various corporate structures. He has also said, also quite correctly, that these holdings seldom represent a particularly significant portion of the holder's net worth.
Be that as it may, perhaps there is a limit to the egregious mismanagement that the local investors are willing to tolerate. Everyone around here understands that you give cush jobs to your family and your in-laws (as Fifer has) and that's fine. There's a (not so fine) line that should not be crossed. Typically it's not all that easy to cross it. But maybe Fifer has.
Set aside the talk of lawyers and costs and so on. If the powerful local investors want Fifer gone then he'll be out on his ear before he know what's happened and there will not be a thing he can do about it. The good news is he'll have plenty of time to concentrate on his charitable endeavors.
What I don't get is if Martinelli was as popular as the polling gave him credit to be (80%), then why couldn't his Boy get elected? That polling was obviously incorrect.
Well, the Panamanian pollsters don't exactly have Nate Silver working for them.
I saw a joke on Twitter that won't be funny in translation but was funny at the time. It said that the two main polling firms Ipsos and Dichter were going to join forces and open an ice cream stand in the Multiplaza.
I think that most everyone in the country appreciates all of the things the outgoing administration did in the way of public works. In five short years the transportation infrastructure of Panama City has been completely reworked for the better. Hospitals were built in the interior, and schools. Unlike many or most (or all) of his predecessors Martinelli promised huge things and then went out and delivered them. That is a precedent that I would like to see kept.
On the other hand most everyone recognizes that he is a potentially dangerous authoritarian. The memory of the dictatorship is still quite fresh for a lot of people and when they see a guy stack the supreme court in an abusive manner, try to bully the Tribunal Electoral, try to fire his Vice President, insert his wife as the Vice Presidential candidate and basically run around acting like a lunatic, well, obviously people think twice.
Varela has a chance to be a remarkable figure in the history of the country. I hope he can build on the momentum while dialing back the political antagonism. I'd like to see him take the high road when dealing with some of his political enemies, at least initially. When Martinelli came into power he seized quite a bit of prominent land that was supposedly owned by some of his political enemies. That was good theater but likely at the end of the day bad government.
And I'm proud that the democracy functioned as it should and as it must. Now, as I said earlier, let's get back to making some money.
I don' think Navarro would have shut us down. He might have made a show of testing water quality or something along those lines but there's too much money in the ground for anyone who's not a lunatic to start playing games with the miners. But I guess we'll never know.
It's interesting, Martinelli's public works projects and the $100 to jubilados really seem to have eroded a lot of support that the PRD usually counts on. And I thought Navarro was a pretty good candidate, MUCH better than Balbina certainly.
So as far as I can tell the PRD bled some votes to CD while a huge number of the non-aligned voters went with Varela as the least unpalatable choice. If any of the Panamanian polling outfits were worth a damn I would be interested to see exactly how this went down.
One thing is certain, though, and that's no one listens to Mireya anymore. I think everyone wins on that deal.
Anyway, back to work. Let's get this deal done and get back to making money.
With about half of the votes counted it looks like Varela is going to win. Most people I know (including myself) gave Varela no chance. But oddly most everyone I know cast an ambivalent vote for him.
I suppose that this is the best possible outcome. I'm happy to see the end of five years of Italian-style thuggery and I'm happy that the PRD will again be left outside looking in. If Varela can carry on the public works projects in a responsible manner the country will continue its growth and its increased prosperity.
I can't see Varela doing anything to interfere with mining in the country.
It's a very real question whether Petaquilla will continue as an ongoing concern and if by some miracle the company does survive they will continue to be led by the very same people who irresponsibly "led" the company to this point. Are you really that surprised that no one is buying?
I had a dream last night that I bought another couple hundred thousand shares. I really need to quit eating Chinese food just before bed.
Why in the world would First Quantum want to buy PDI?
Hi mjk, I thought it was telling that rather than repudiate the report from TVN, a respected national news source, you instead elected to attack a blogger. Sure, that fellow Okke is a sensationalist and certainly no friend of Petaquilla's. But he's just that, a sensationalist blogger. Not to say he's necessarily wrong. I don't know. But I do know that he has always had an anti-mining agenda and it's fair enough to point that out. (I'll remind everyone that I did not reference Okke, nor do I know him.)
But if you're going to try to discredit Okke you should probably use a credible source rather than an equally sensationalist attention whore who also happens to be a convicted felon. Surely that is obvious, no?
Don Winner is a ham-fisted halfwit who presents himself as a journalist when he mostly populates his site with the copied and pasted work of real journalists. You call him your friend. I don't doubt that he is. Some of the other friends you trumpet give us an idea of the standard you apply.
In fairness, Winner has done some admirable work chasing down serial killers. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about please know I am not kidding. This guy Winner is basically a cartoon but every now and then he decides to do the work that the local constabulary should be doing but aren't and actually brings to justice or at least brings to light a serious criminal. It's weird. But then, this is Panama so what did you expect?
And when did I ever say that I was unhappy with my investment in Petaquilla? I am proud to be a shareholder. I have a significant stake in the company and am happy to have it. I recognize that I have a higher tolerance for company tomfoolery than some others might because my investment is partially based on patriotism. But I also have a significant stake in Copa and somehow those guys seem to know how to run a business. You'll excuse me for having more admiration for companies that shepherd their resources wisely and manage to grow their business while turning a profit and delivering value to their stakeholders than I do for companies that are run into the ground by incompetence, arrogance, ignorance, kleptomania, or who knows what.
Please feel free to exult as the share price dives ever lower. I know that you somehow wear your tolerance for managerial mishap as a badge of honor. That's your right. But I recommend you be a bit less condescending to those of us who might like the surprise of seeing PTQ in the green every now and then. Otherwise you'll continue to be taken to task and it's apparent that you'd rather give than get.
And in the spirit of the equal time rule I'll leave you with this: Panamá es pa'lante, no hay pa'tras!
Nice attempt at diversion MJK!!! Hey everyone... look at the crap about Orin but don't pay attention to the actual problem of not paying their people and being shut down.
It's not just that he's attempting to divert attention to something irrelevant - which he obviously is - to me the hilarious thing is that unsurprisingly everything he posts is pure BS. I do not know Okke nor do I have an opinion of him but I do know that he lives in Taboga which is very much in Panama.
I also know that many if not all of the 'convictions' that his adversaries like to highlight are complete fantasy.
And I also know that the source for many of these fantasy convictions (and several of the links MJK provides) is himself a convicted felon who, unlike Okke, was actually convicted of a crime (financial fraud) and spent time in a very real prison.
So, yeah, more of the same - unadulterated nonsense from the world's foremost Petaquilla jock sniffer.
Yes, exactly, this is clearly a pro-worker piece. Which is not to say it is inaccurate. But it may well be that a total work suspension makes sense if FQM isn't buying aggregate during the negotiations.
I will admit that I really don't know what sort of environmental impact an idle mine might have in the short term. The mine obviously won't sit idle for years but I don't know how dangerous it is to have the mine idle for a number of months.
The workers aren't being paid. We knew that. Not even their social security is being paid. Now it appears that the company has indicated to the ministry of labor that they wish to suspend the contract they maintain with the unionized workers:
http://www.tvn-2.com/noticias/noticias_detalle.asp?id=135054
I especially like the final paragraph:
A juicio de De León, los problemas financieros se deben a dos motivos: la pérdida de una concesión de una mina que esta empresa trató de explotar en España y a mala administración de la mina en Panamá.
I wonder if the executives have had the decency to suspend their own pay during this time of crisis.
Depending on who gets elected the next President of Panama PTQ may be toast even if they get enough money to stay alive. That's the way it works in a banana republic.
First, I don't believe Panama is any more corrupt than any other country. I don't feel like the corruption is particularly worse here than, say, in the US. The scale is different and some of the details are different but I can't possibly argue that Panama is more corrupt than the US.
Second, the race between Arias and Navarro is very, very close. That doesn't really surprise me. What's surprising to me is the demographics of the supporters, namely that Arias has a significant portion of the low income vote, the people who ride in a bus two hours each way to their jobs to earn minimum wage.
Yet Navarro may win. If he does I doubt very seriously that it will impact our mine in any material manner one way or the other. There is far too much money in the dirt up there for anyone to try to put the brakes on the projects at this stage.
At the end - Company might come out debt free ( for the most part) and who knows , lean and mean, we will see.
And, sadly, with the same management and board that got the company into this unholy mess to begin with.
By the way, emerging debt-free is a pipe dream for a company that has huge AP in addition to what it owes DB, particularly for a company that is, at present, not doing anything that generates revenue.