Some people have alluded to B-D being involved with discovering, enhancing, or modifying assay and/or recovery processes. To my knowledge, that has never been their role. Their role was to verify the processes IPM wanted verified, to provide security for digging, packaging, distributing, and processing Chain of Custody samples, and to independently obtain assay and/or recovery results on ore that was supposedly never touched by IPM.
Bob, this is my understanding as well. The much-touted recovery scale-up process was actually done at FM; and as I understand it, the tweaking of the process was done by "Sam the man". IPM has continually contracted with various labs to do the "science" (e.g., AuRIC).
Although there has been no mention of it, I've got to believe B-D wrote up their findings and sent them to IPM. You don't pay a consultant for many, many months and not get written information - regardless of whether the information is good or bad. Why hasn't IPM released this report?
My understanding is that BD supplied IPM with monthly reports! What would you give to see some of those documents? It would be interesting to see in just which month did it become clear to all that the scale-up wasn't working or wasn't going to be an economic process. Doubt that IPM could determine the economics of the process (who in the company would do it?); but I'll bet half of my few remaining shares that BD knew. Of course, the Board of Directors would never permit anyone to see those documents, would they?
O. H. |
