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Harte Gold (HRT.to) is the new Metanor

While noting the casual air in which Harte Gold (HRT.to) this evening inflicted yet another dilutive placement on its long-suffering retail shareholders, your humble scribe could not help but reflect on the striking similarities between this serial killer of speculators’ dreams and the old Metanor (ex-MTO) when it mined the Bachelor Lake property. Both are examples of decent deposits run by well-meaning miners who do not have the first clue about finances and blow their capital structures to bits by accepting whatever deal, as long as they get to open their mine. But it’s not just that, because they’ve gone almost exactly the same route by…
a) painful overdilution of share count (and “drop-of-hat” style NRs were the MTO thing)
b) debt financing now coming due at a bad time, causing negative working capital (which tempts them back to the equity market and more freakin dilution, just like MTO)
c) a godforsaken derivatives contract, what with MTO and its SAND stream or HRT and its embarrassingly poorly timed hedging contracts.
…and the match is uncanny. We know what happened in the end at Metanor, shareholders were crushed under dilution, the company could never raised the capital it needed to truly advance productivity, the whole thing was picked up for pennies by Mr Eric Sprott O.B.O* and now it would seem Bonterra are making a good fist of unlocking what there is up there as a regional play. Metanor is the poster child example of shareholders losing because financial fools get in the way of them and the mine. From what I’ve seen to date Harte Gold is following the model closely.
*Our Benign Overlord

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