Here is a good one.
Silverado Mining - ROTFLMAO
There's more than profits and losses to the stock market
David Baines, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, February 16, 2008
The stock market is a mysterious place. There are lots of companies that trade on the junior markets that never make money, but they manage to stay alive and keep trading.
The best example is Silverado Gold Mines Ltd. It was formed in 1963 -- 45 years ago -- and it has never had a profitable year. Since inception, it has lost more than $86 million US.
Yet its chairman, president and founder, 64-year-old Gary Anselmo, lives a very comfortable life. He lives in a $883,000 house in Richmond, he drives a 2006 Corvette, he eats at the finest restaurants and flies first class wherever he goes (he says because of a back injury).
Anselmo boasts, quite truthfully, that he takes no salary from Silverado, but this is not the whole truth. Over the years, he has earned millions of dollars through his private company, Tri-Con Mining Ltd., which acts as the operator for Silverado's two main projects -- the Nolan gold project near Fairbanks, Alaska, and its newer "green" project, a process for making coal water (an environmentally friendly substitute for petroleum-derived fuels).
Tri-Con bills the company at the rate of cost plus 15 per cent for overhead, plus 25 per cent for exploration services or 15 per cent for development and mining services. Over the years, this arrangement has put millions of dollars into Anselmo's pocket.
During the nine months ending August 2007 (the company's last reporting period), Tri-Con billed Silverado a total of $4.26 million. If just 15 per cent represents profit to Anselmo, that amounts to $639,000. Keep in mind, that's for the last nine months only.
Where does all this money come from? Every once in a while, when the treasury gets low, Silverado issues more shares for cash. Over the years, it has done this many times. There are now 778 million shares outstanding. And that's after a three-for-one share consolidation and a 10-for-one consolidation. The net result is that the company has manufactured more paper than a toilet paper factory.
Of course, people will only buy a stock if they feel they can unload it at a higher price. There are two ways to get the stock price higher. The first is for the company to do something productive. In this regard, Silverado has been a flop.
Every project the company has undertaken has ended in failure. In 1985, for example, Anselmo was touting the Mount Grant gold mine in Alaska, claiming it had "the potential for being one of the highest recovery producers in North America."
Commercial production began in November 1985, but a little more than a month later, operations were suspended "after initial operating results did not meet expectations."
The company shifted focus to its Nolan Creek project. In October 1992, Anselmo said projected earnings for the year ending November 1994 would be $8.96 million US. In fact, the company lost $3.1 million U.S.
Anselmo is still flogging the Nolan gold project, but he has also jumped on the "green" bandwagon. In 2000, he announced that Silverado would establish a plant in Alaska to produce coal water.
