Ten years is somewhat long term and iffy.
AQI has the resources of courts. From the preliminary indications, it has some substance to its claim.
Claim jumping on info is very, very common in this industry. Like many businesses the ethical rule book is very slim, and has many blank pages for writing your own ticket against weaker parties. Many just do what they can get away with for now, like common thieves.
Every decent honourable geologist I have talked to has tales of interference and theft amongst many an iconic company. I have several as many people know. I am not shy about alluding to them either, which gains me notoriety and some disrepute. Thieves don't like me. Strange. I always wanted to be looked up to by scoundrels. I am heartbroken.
Remember Hemlo? I know all the people involved. Eddie O'Neill, Larry Salo, Dennis Sheehan, Don McKinnon, John Larche, Roy Newman, Phil Daoust, and a few others. There are other luminaries in that mix, Murray Pezim, Rocco Schiarelli et al. Interesting crowd. I staked in the area at the time. Tried to sell claims to a partner. You could hear the Noranda drills running from the claims. He refuse to buy. Hmmmm sad..
Anyway a geologist visited the office of Corona who were doing some drilling. He did not sign a confidentiality at all. He looked at what they were doing and decided to get the property next door which they had told him had the plunge of the drilling. The property was owned by a widow of a prospector in the area, Mrs. Williams. She lived in the States. The geologist, Dennis Sheehan took the info back to Lac Minerals and they made a deal on the Williams property. Later a judge in the Ontario appellate court, Holland, ruled that whether or not Sheehan had signed any paper, ANY TIME a company shows its confidential data, there must exist an understanding if a deal is being discussed pertinent to that data, that there must exist a fiduciary trust between the parties that is a common and implicit understanding or no exchange could take place. To say that one party in a deal is allowed to think, or understand that what it learns it can use to the detriment of the other party is unthinkable. Holland ruled "on the balance of the probabilities" (his words) that a "fiduciary trust had to have been established" (his words) or the discussions would not have taken place. On word of mouth only, without a scrap of paper being signed, an orebody worth 2.5 billion dollars, with a mill worth 300 million changed hands and passed from Lac minerals to Corona. Sheehan and Lac had erred. Corona triumphed. Justice had been done.
A fiduciary trust is a trust established between unrelated parties in business who wish to share resources, or do a deal. The components of that trust are pertinent to what form their deal takes and what it depends on. If data is exchanged then it should be understood that the data is to help the other party form a decision to make that deal, not for their education and otherwise use, unless explicitly stated.
For two decades after, companies, not understanding the word "fiduciary", tried to explicitly write that word out of their deals. (Inco had such a confidentiality). That is laughable. One cannot make a deal, and say "There is no element of trust in this deal, we have no duty to you as normal business partners exploring a relationship would have." Who would ever do a deal if this was the case?
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