The holes that were "twinned", and came back, had near if not better than the same results as the original Gulf report. So I doubt that the rocks the Chinese took had bad results. More likely a deal couldn't have been reached, so they didn't share. Again why go through all the work spend your money, only to had it over if a deal wasn't going to happen.
Mgmt always claimed the SOE never delivered the report. The deal never went anywhere because China's economy and the mining sector went through a period of stagnation and contraction. No doubt Scott's shady nature didn't help matters.
The idea that there was anything wrong with the rocks is typical of the BS posted here. Not surprised it's being brought up again after a good PR.
Plenty of work was done after the SOE deal fell apart, including more drilling. To say otherwise is also a lie.
The results I believe you are referring to were check samples that srsr had assayed. This is common practice where when you send off a bulk sample to another party that you also take a grab sample to assay as a check. That's what was released. It didn't come from the soe.
"As previously announced, Nio-Star has collected and shipped approximately 900 kilograms of rock samples from the adit area of the Nemegosenda project to a China Research facility for metallurgical, process testing. Grab samples were selected from the shipment and sent for assaying in Canada as a check, and results have now been received. As the samples were taken from the well-explored adit area of the project, positive niobium and tantalum results were expected, and received. Two of the assays returned Nb2O5 (niobium pentoxide) results of 0.86% and 0.51% respectively. A third sample returned negligible Nb2O5 results, with 6700 ppm Ta2O5."