Niocorp Developments Ltd (NB)

[walterc]

I hope this helps to clarify some some of the confusion yesterday over here

My mail to Jim

Jim

There is some confusion amongst shareholders resulting from a paragraph in a recent article where Mark was quoted as follows..

In the interim, Smith is looking to secure a $25 million cornerstone investor to get the project out of the starting blocks.
“There are lots of front-end things that we can do. If we bring that anchor equity investor in with that amount of money, we can start to get the infrastructure together for the project, like getting gas lines and electrical lines out to the project.
Some shareholders now think that our debt partner which Mark talked about in the past is out of the picture and that we are now further away from total project financing ? Can you give us some clarification?


Jim's reply reply
Walter –

We are working with a number of global financial institutions, including the debt partner with which we have been in ongoing discussions for more than two years, that are interested in potentially providing large amounts of debt financing to the Project. We are also working with a number of financial institutions that are more interested and inclined to make equity investments.

Our goal is to secure an “anchor” investor, or a group of investors, on the debt side, and an “anchor” investor, or a group of investors, on the equity side. This is how many projects of this size get financed. As you would expect, the investing goals are different between debt and equity investors. The first step in the ‘dance’ that occurs between debt and equity is to identify a relatively high-profile investment group to make a relatively small equity investment on the front end (in our case, something between USD20 – USD25M). That would signal to all of the other players that a major investment group has taken a significant early stake in the Company, which encourages others to move forward and helps us to (hopefully) secure definitive financing agreements on both sides of the debt/equity fence.

It is all a balancing act. The process ebbs and flows. It takes time. Viewed from the outside, it appears to move at a glacial pace. But I can assure you that we are all working furiously to move this process forward, and on multiple fronts.

Until definitive agreements are reached, our securities counsel will not allow us to provide much detail about the status of this process. That is frustrating to us and to investors, I know. It is particularly frustrating to Mark and me, as we love to tell the NioCorp and Elk Creek story to just about anyone who will listen. But our team is very careful to not say anything in public until we are cleared to do so. This is not an uncommon position for publicly traded companies like ours that are raising large amounts of capital for project financing.

BTW, the phrase in the article you referenced was not a quote from Mark. The reporter who wrote this story is a very good and seasoned journalist, but in this case his characterization of this initial equity tranche as getting “the project out of the starting blocks” was his characterization, not Mark’s. It is not an accurate description of where we are and how this process proceeds.

Jim Sims
VP, External Affairs
NioCorp Developments Ltd.
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