From WillP of stockwatch fame:
Dr. Bill Pfaffenberger and Paul Ogilvie's Saint Jean Carbon Inc. (SJL), unchanged at two cents on 231,000 shares, is embroiled in turmoil once again. The company said after the close Monday that it had terminated its president, Dr. Pfaffenberger, effective immediately. It also requested that he resign from the company's board and said it would call a special meeting to have him replaced should he not oblige. Saint Jean Carbon and its CEO, Paul Ogilvie, said nothing about why it had fired its president, who had been with the company since 2006, when it was Torch River Resources. (Dr. Pfaffenberger was CEO and president of Torch when it hired Mr. Ogilvie as CEO five years ago, changed its name to Saint Jean Carbon and chose to focus on graphite exploration.) Dr. Pfaffenberger was not a big drain on the company's treasury, as he pulled in just $40,000 last year in salary. Mr. Ogilvie's paycheques are another matter: He received nearly $470,000 in salary last year.
Mr. Ogilvie chose to dispense with the charade of kind words in bidding Dr. Pfaffenberger adieu, perhaps because of his own experience five years earlier, when Bruce Duncan's Canada Carbon Inc. (CCB: $0.085) said Mr. Ogilvie had been "replaced, effective immediately." At the time, Mr. Duncan thanked Mr. Ogilvie for his effort over his one-year stint in "setting in motion the company's vision of ultimately becoming a leading carbon sciences company."
There has not been a peep about the investigation launched by the Alberta Securities Commission in March of 2017, after Saint Jean's crew had promotionally juiced a one-time order from Panasonic Corp. for several kilograms of graphite into something that was "part of an off-take agreement to supply multiple tonnes of anode material monthly for a number of years." As it turned out, the number of years was zero, and the multiple was a tiny fraction. Shareholders bid the stock to a 35.5-cent high on the "news," only to see it fall below a nickel again, leaving them unsurprisingly upset.
Gregory Bowes's Northern Graphite Corp. (NGC), down one cent to 42 cents on 136,000 shares, says a European trading company has agreed to sell all Northern's projected graphite production from the Bissett Creek deposit to Chinese buyers. All that need happen is for Northern Graphite to arrange financing for its mine and to build it. The cost of the mine, according to Northern's most recent update to its many studies, was just over $100-million. Bissett Creek held nearly 70 million tonnes measured and indicated at 1.74 per cent graphite and 24 million tonnes inferred at 1.65 per cent. Despite the low grades, Northern's study yielded a dreamy discounted net present value of $192-million after taxes, thanks to its high price expectations. |
