To: E. Charters who wrote (62546 ) 12/20/2008 3:07:35 PM From: E. Charters Respond to The part that story misses is that another company called Scintilore Res. under the direction of Roy Newman had hired John Larche of Timmins to stake the claims when he was in Toronto. He travelled thru Timmins to pick up supplies and men and thence back down to highway 17 to the site near Marathon Ontario. There he alleged later in court that he found that Don McKinnon had already staked them. He subsequently decided to partner with McKinnon to jointly develop the property. I don't know what a modern NDA would say about that. In actual fact the name that was put on the post was that of Eddie (Bullshit) O'Neill, a mining promoter with a photographic memory, who although he was unable to actually stake claims could always walk to the number one post of any claim, and with his flawless recollection testify in court that he had actually been there. It was necessary under the mining act in that day that to record a claim in a particular name you had to physically be the staker. Proxy staking as practiced in BC was not allowed. I had personally found that his description of post locations made 20 years previous was uncanny, having gone on his directions to locations on occasion. The actual worker who made the posts and affixed the tags thereof in the field was a prospector line cutter by the name of Larry Salo, who had a sure enough connection with Don McKinnon as he was practically raised by him and did most of Don's field work. The probability is high that Salo-McKinnon-O'Neill were the co-conspirators who staked the claims. It is possible they knew of no plan by Larche to do so at the time. It was always alleged, and at least once in a court that Larche, a frequent partner of McKinnon's in the bush, had met in Timmins, or exchanged information allowing McKinnon time to stake in advance of Larche, thereby scooping Newman and Scintilore. A protracted lawsuit found no clear cut evidence that this was so. A later lawsuit alleging the impropriety of the supposed proxy staking, brought by local Marathon interests, was also unsuccessful in that the judge did not believe even if the staking was by statute improper, that this act did not disallow the rightful ownership of the subsequently staked claim, or the claims themselves! This is a strange precedent indeed! It may be that the judge felt that McKinnon was only the contractor of the staking and nothing could directly connect him to the proxy staking. This could be. But the judge declared he would not look at the whole issue of the propriety of the staking! The real rip off was that Noranda declared some 20 years later that they still had not paid back the capital expenditure of the mine they started at Hemlo. This was because the royalty specified that it was to be paid after the mine had received payback. Never mind Enron, Noranda who had spent $300 million developing at Hemlo, and earned some $6 billion at today's prices since start up, had the quintessentially most creative accounting known since Blackbeard.
