Not just poor business/legal policy but engr as well.
Your right, between the financing, the security risks, the legal proceedings and the CEO dumping the SH into chpt7 just to save his own hide is probably enough to write a paper on a failing company in America, the engineering mishaps were notable as well.
Being an engineer, I knew enough about the mining process to think I knew something. But, I clearly didn't. So I fell for Scott Dockter's story about the previous company did not grind most of the ore to the most efficient size and high yields could still be obtained from the heaps. They even quoted over 50% yield. In the end the yields were under 10%. A lab, in perfect conditions, was able to yield 14%. It seems that there was probably a good reason why the previous company did what they did. Likely a large percentage of the ore was too tough to grind to the most effective size, so they didn't waste the money to do so. This is probably why the RC Mine, under FG, could only process ~10K tons a day even though they promised Platinum it would be ~40k tons a day. Also, someone on iHub mentioned that SD was not screening out the fine ore, which had little gold left to recover. Thus making the yields even lower. The only reason I can think of to do that is to increase your tons/day of ore processed for Platinum's eyes.
So they went into production and put out a PR and even had an "independent" analyst report how the stock will be worth so much due to production. They invited individual investors to the mine and took their money. Shortly after someone at FG blew the whistle, Platinum pulled, the stock tumbled.
The CEO told the court later that they knew of the low yield, but went into production to prove they had a working processing plant to help get financing so they could mine ore from the mine itself, not the heaps.
-Y
