By Peter @Newton Bell, September 30, 2016.
This article presents the transcript of a conversation that I conducted with Aton Resources for the CEO.CA community. It was my pleasure to conduct this interview with Mr. Mark Campbell, CEO, and Mr. Blaine Monaghan, VP of IR. A big shout out to Blaine for organizing this interview just a few days after his appointment as VP for Aton Resources.
This is not investment advice. Do your own due diligence. I hold shares in the company.
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P: Hello, this is Peter Bell. I'm talking with Mark Campbell and Blaine Monaghan from Aton Resources. And we are going to go through a series of questions related to their company. Before we do so, I've got a bunch of facts that I want to present and confirm if my understanding is in the ball park regarding the company.
P: Stage of exploration? You guys are working on a district. It includes almost a dozen targets, I believe. One of them has a resource estimate from 2012. Another one has a resource coming soon, potentially. And there are a bunch more targets located in between those two substantial targets. I see early, mid, and advanced stage exploration all in a localized area with rich poly-metallic drill results.
P: Current status of the project? I would say it is active! You have assays pending as you're moving towards establishing a resource for three of the zones around the Hamama target. You have other work on earlier stage targets to help connect the bigger targets at either end of the concession.
P: The work history? I would say it is long and laboured. There is lots of drilling on lots of targets in the last few years. Somehow the use of modern exploration techniques is still under-used on the concession, which is exciting.
P: The ownership of the project? It is wholly-owned by you guys. There seems to be a nasty 50-50 government take after you recover your costs, but that is something to discuss.
P: Capital invested by the company and prior owners of the project: That's a little less clear to me. I see maybe $1-2M having been spent this year on drill programs. Maybe up to $5M in prior years.
M: If I can interject there, Peter, we've spent close to $10M.
P: Oh, wow. My apologies for that mistake. That's the benefit of running through all these things off the top -- I will point out all of my misunderstandings so that you can correct me.
P: Details of the resource estimates? Again, not so clear to me. I think I recall seeing a headline number of 2M ounces gold-equivalent from the 2012 resource, but I feel like the poly-metallic mineralization means that the nuance is very important here. Some of that is unclear to me, despite the extensive drill results that you have so far.
P: Legal jurisdiction? You're a Canadian public company operating in Egypt. The relevant policy I believe is set by the Ministry of Energy. There is a large precedent of foreign mining companies in Egypt, but there are issues too.
P: Management overview? Mark Campbell stepped in as interim-CEO and held things together through tough times. You seem to be delivering on building a great team there, Mark. Recent hire of COO and IR-lead from True Gold. Nice to have you on the call there Blaine too, thanks. Advisory board members with mining experience in Egypt. You've got Tookie Angus on the board. And dedicated, private shareholders with over 30%.
P: Last few points here. Number of shares outstanding? I'm seeing approximately 100M shares out now. It was 300M before a 5:1 roll back, and then another 40M shares having been issued this year.
P: Cash position and working capital? A little unclear to me. There is some debate on the CEO.CA site around the reported figures and whether there is a deficit currently.
P: History of all financings? My knowledge goes back to the start of 2015. I see the same property going back to 2008, with big changes to management team. Shares in lieu of salary, and things like that. I don’t have the whole picture on financings there as well.
P: To run through the gamut of basic information that I wanted to cover before we get into a conversation with Mark Campbell, CEO of Aton Resources, and Mr. Blaine Monaghan, VP of IR.
P: Hello guys, thanks very much for being on the call with me here.
M: Good to be here.
P: I know I gave you a lot of information off the start there. Was there anything that seemed totally egregious that you can correct me on before we get into these questions?
M: Well, the resource at Abu Marawat was actually 397 thousand ounces gold equivalent. So, two million is nice but not exactly realistic.
B: Cash spent by Aton at Abu Marawat was approximately $10M.
M: Little over that, closer to $11M.
B: Prior to Aton, there was just one prior drill campaign by another company -- quite small.
M: That was back in the 80s. A company called MinEx.
P: Great, thanks for correcting me. There were a couple points where I was way off the mark. Let's get into these questions. I've got a list of eight questions that are taken from Rick Rule's Guide to Natural Resource Investing in 2014, I shared them with you before hand, and I'm keen to hear what you have to say.
P: The first question is: What are the company's goals and what strategies will it use to reach them?
M: Well, our goal is actually to make the next big discovery in Africa, which we think we have the possibility of doing. You know, we've got seven-hundred and thirty-eight square-kilometers of concession area here and if you look at the Arabian-Nubian Shield, there has been quite a prolific amount of success in Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. We think that the Eastern Desert of Egypt is heavily under-explored.
M: If you think about it, there's thousands of years of mining history here. You've just got to look at King Tut's household to see that. And yet, in the modern era, not very much. There's a thousand potential ancient mining sites that have been identified so far in the Eastern Desert. By using modern exploration techniques, we think that we can unlock what we have here.
M: There are only two other companies here. One is a producer, which is Centamin. They produced about 400,000 ounces in 2015. Their direction for this year is over half a million. And they've got about thirteen million ounces in the ground of measured and indicated. They have done very well here. The other company is a private company that is a joint-venture between a company called Family Dubai and Stratix, which is an AIM listed mining company. They have a project way down in the south-east that they are going to start drilling in October. That's really the extent of the activity here. So we're really on the ground floor of Egypt. We've been here a long-time, we've been here since 2007. We know the area and we know what we're doing. We're looking to make a similar discovery here along with Centamin's big discovery down at Sukari.
M: Through the work that we've done, we have established an inferred resource at Abu Marawat. Now, we have come over to Hamama, which is a VMS target. We have, over the years, done some regional sampling and mapping, which have identified at least ten other targets. And we may have just identified another one. Plenty of scope within that 40km mineralized trend that we have there. It's a unique opportunity for any company to have that many potential targets all within it's own property.
M: So, we're doing that. As I say, there are numerous workings. There are two historical gold mines that were mined by the Brits. We're going to do more drilling. We're in the process of putting together a few programs. At the moment, we're in the middle of doing spectral imaging and remote sensing project over the whole area of Hamama and Abu Marawat, specifically, and regionally over the rest of the concession area.
P: At the start, I mentioned that I was going to try and reflect-back some of the things I was hearing from you and summarize them to confirm that we were on the same page with my understanding of what you had said. But, given the amount or depth and breadth of what you have said, I think it's a little too ambitious. So I am going to hold off and save some of my questions for the end of the discussion here.
P: Maybe I will ask Blaine in the background if you have anything to add to this first question.
B: When I signed on with Aton, it was a relatively unknown name. When I was first made aware of the opportunity to join the company, I carried out my own due diligence. Looking at the size of the property and the potential, the history of gold mining in Egypt with so little modern exploration -- the size and potential of productivity, I jumped at the chance. Considering it's market cap and where the gold market is moving, I think the upside in Aton is pretty good.
P: I get the sense we could have an extensive conversation just based on this first question. I'm looking at all the ways I could attack it, and it's great to be digging into it here with you guys. Thanks.
P: Let's move on to the second one. How are you going to make me money on this deal and when will I make it?
M: Well, that's one of questions that you're not supposed to ask me. As you know, we changed out our management and there was a lot of reasons for that. I have a firm belief that our job here is to return value to the shareholders. I think we have all been in junior resource stocks of many varieties, carried out feet-first. So, I have a very jaundiced view of junior resource company management, a lot of times. We have a very good team. The board of directors are very good, very solid guys. Our goal is to ensure that the shareholders make money because that is what we're here to do. The team we are putting together, I think, have the ability to do that. We have a very good exploration team and it's led by Mr. Rick Cavaney. Now, Rick Cavaney was the original exploration manager down at Sukari -- spent eight and a half years in Egypt. Twenty years ago, he walked around this property and did some early mapping and work. No man knows it better than he does. And the other people that we have, that he's brought in, are excellent at what they do. My job is to make sure that they're able to do their job.
M: We will approach this in a step-wise progression of working our way down the three-kilometer strike length. Which may, you know, end up being a six-kilometer strike length. To put that into context, the Sukari mine is two kilometers. So, it's a process, a step-wise, logical process of exploration and that's what we'll do. We're careful with how we spend our money. We believe it should go into the ground, not into manager's pockets. My personal belief -- I'm the lowest paid guy here! And until we're able to make money, that will remain so. I mean, that is set in stone. If we're going to pay people, it's going to be the guy who actually makes the discovery. The guys who are actually on the ground doing the work. And that's how you return value, I think.
M: And we will make that through the drill bit. Moving ahead, consistently to prove-up the deposit to get to that point where we can make a significant discovery. We don't have any other job but to do that. That is where our efforts are focused, is spending our money in the ground to develop that.
M: We just completed a thirty-five-hundred-meter drill program. We drilled a total of thirty-six holes. We drilled a total of ninety-six holes over the last period from 2011. We are nearly into a hundred holes of drilling. We concentrated on the Western Zone of Hamama. There are three zones at Hamama. There's the West, the Central, and the Eastern zone. We've started at the Western Zone because it has a super-gene enriched oxide cap, which has a lot of high-grade gold. This is one of the things that we have been focusing on. We're in the process of trying to produce an initial resource for Hamama West. We've released some assay results, and we're waiting on the rest to be released. I think that the 60.8 meters of 1.2 grams of gold equivalent is indicative of the poly-metallic nature of the deposit. We get places of high gold, sometimes high silver values. And then we get some high zinc values. It is indicative of what you expect out of a VMS. Last year, we've seen holes with, for example, 43M of 2.6 g/t of just gold. We do have high-grade gold in there. The other thing great thing about it is that you don’t have cover here. Our holes, by and large, are mineralized from surface. That is a distinct advantage. When you see it, you'll see what I mean.
M: There are no environmental issues because there's nobody out here. It has a lot of advantages and those are what we want to exploit, because that's how we're going to make you money. You know, we believe that Hamama has that potential. In terms of timing, we're moving to do that as quickly as we can.
P: Well, I think you could see my face -- I am smiling ear-to-ear. Appreciate you taking a run at one of those questions that you're not supposed to ask.
M: You can ask us anything -- we'll give you an answer!
P: Moving on, question number three: what can go wrong? How will I know what is going wrong, and what will you do if it goes wrong?
M: In mining, lots of things can go wrong. Usually, when people ask me that question, they mean it in terms of Egypt. They talk about the security risk, political risk, and those being some of their concerns. I've worked in Egypt for many, many years. I come from Texas originally and, to be honest with you, I would be more worried about walking down a street in Houston on a Saturday night then I have ever been concerned about my safety in Egypt.
M: I think it is like anything with media -- you've got to take it with a bag of salt. Egypt, by and large, is a very stable place. The people are very moderate in their views. I don’t see it as an issue. Maybe some people do, but I don’t. Abu Marawat is located in a very unpopulated region. There is nobody out here. We don't have armed guards. We don't have enormous amounts of security. They're not required. We never even, throughout the period of the revolution, we never had any issues. We never had any problems out here. From that standpoint, it is just very quiet.
M: When we drove to camp yesterday, there was no armed guards. We don’t have to travel in convoys, like people do in a lot of places. Never have. I actually live here. I'm based in Egypt. I walk to the office every day and I know the country. I've lived here off and on for many years. I think it is important for the person to be running this to be here. It's difficult to run a business like this from Vancouver or Houston. You have to have someone here that knows their way around. If I was going to do it from Houston, then I'd have to have a 'me' and I don’t know a 'me', so I'm it! I'm here.
M: We have a very good relationship with the Egyptian Government. I went to see the Minister of Petroleum the other day. He was very supportive. I've just added a man onto our advisory board, Mr. Tom Maher. Tom just recently took over as President and CEO of a company called Apex, which is a new private-equity funded oil and gas exploration company. Previously, for many years he had been here in Egypt with Apache. Ultimately as Regional Vice President and Head of Apache Egypt, which is the largest unit of Apache. Now, Apache is the largest oil producer in Egypt and is also the largest foreign-investor in Egypt. His knowledge of Egypt, his contacts, and his belief in what we're doing. It's a great asset for us, in terms of operating.
M: You know, mining at the moment represents less than one percent of Egypt's GDP. They would like to get up, over the next several years, to somewhere around five percent. They are quite keen to see the mining and mineral industry expand and attract foreign investors. We're very excited and would love to see more mining companies come here to operate. This is an excellent time to invest in Egypt for mining. I think it holds a lot of opportunity for companies to operate here.
P: Thank you very much. If I can ask a technical question about the poly-metallic nature of the mineralization. Do you see that as a potential challenge or weakness in terms of metallurgy and things like that?
M: Well, no. We have done some met-test work before. It's never proven-up any problems. We will do more extensive met-test work now, when all the assays are back in we will send them off to ALS in Kamloops and we will get that back. But, no, nothing gives us an indication this will be problematic.
P: Great, moving on here. Please can you comment on possible valuation of the assets of the company. And feel free to say 'pass' on any of these questions.
M: It's a question I think people will ask, but it's a tricky one to answer. If you look at us in general, and you have to do it in a relative manner. Look at the scope of what we have. We have just short of four-hundred thousand ounces at Abu Marawat with the ability to drill a lot more targets. Just south of there is an area called Miranda Gossan, which is an area that is probably inter-connected with Abu Marawat. So, that holds a lot of potential. You come down to Hamama and, again, the scope and scale of it are such that the potential is vast. I could tell you anecdotal stories about that, but the fact of the matter is that very few companies I can think of that have the potential and number of identifiable exploration and drilling targets that we do. And we're valued at what, nine-million bucks?
M: Look at it too -- there's the exploration team that we've got, plus the people that have got involved. The directors, people like Tookie Angus. People like Tom Maher. They obviously see the potential, they understand it, and when you have people of that calibre who want to get involved with you, I think it says something about the overall company and the potential.
P: Indeed, I would agree. Thank you. We can move on. Who else will you tell this story to, how will you tell them, and when?
M: Well, I'll tell it to anyone who wants to listen! Not only does the company have a fantastic opportunity, it is a relatively unknown story. And that's why we've hired Blaine. To really push that forward. We see this now as the time to be out telling our story. We've got a lot of exciting things to say. We've got a lot of exciting things to do. Now is a good time for us to be out there and telling that story. We're looking to build a strong audience. We've got a lot of news in the pipeline. We're looking to produce an initial resource calculation. We're doing geophysics, which will give us a much better sense of drilling and that is right along the West, Central, and Eastern zones of Hamama.
M: We think that our ability to move this project forward in a timely manner is high. It's a good time for investors to hear that. We have had quite a bit of unbelievable media coverage. We've been everywhere from CNN to Reuters to Bloomberg to National Geographic! We've had a lot of interest. Even the AP came and did a story -- and for six months it was the biggest story to come out of the Middle East! It does capture people's imagination. I do think that people are interested to hear it, and now is the time for us to be telling it.
P: Wonderful, thank you. If I can push and prod a bit more there, please can I ask for any comments on promotional budget?
M: I'll let Blaine address that.
B: Prior to signing on, I put forward a budget. I think it is a very good budget, I think it addresses the needs to identify and target all the stakeholders you might like to. I think it's also a cost-effective budget. We will be looking at a number of different initiatives, like attending some of the investment conferences. We'll be looking at high-value and institutional investors. A lot of the work will just be talking to people, meeting with them one-one, road shows, marketing trips for institutions, sell-side analysts, talking with newsletter writers, talking with investment advisors who are known to invest in stories like this. Trade publications. There are many stakeholders, we know who they are and we're going to be targeting them and telling them the story. I'm quite confident that, once we do that, we can build and generate interest that will benefit shareholders.
P: Great, thank you. Moving on, please can you tell me about your management team and directors, especially their past success in mining and markets?
M: Well, I think we have an excellent management team, frankly. Bill Koutsouras, who is our Chairman, was for many years the Chief Financial Officer of Endeavour. Both Giles Baynham and David Laing, who are mining engineers by background, were with Endeavour and certainly were key in the success of that company. Giles now is running DuSolo Fertilizer. He was brought in as CEO at the beginning of the year. And David Laing, who has been with True Gold, is now starting off with another project. They are well respected in the community there, and throughout Canada and the UK. Tony Clements, who is on our board, has been a well-known mining broker and financier for nearly forty years in the UK. He worked at Yorkton for many years and a lot of other firms. He was the US fund manager for the Postale, the post office pension fund in the UK. He brings a lot of experience to the board and we're very lucky to have him.
M: Again, the Board of Advisors. Tookie Angus, Nevsun is a fabulous success story. He is very, very helpful to us and shares a lot of his experiences, which are a great help to me. Ian Stalker, again is a mining engineer. Who successfully built UraMin, which was a successful uranium mining company. He is also very helpful. James Leahy, probably one of the most well-respected brokers in London in his day. He is now Chairman of Bacanora Resources, which is a lithium mining company in Mexico. Again, very well respected. And Tom Merah, the ex-head of Apache here and now President/CEO of Frex International, which has a lot of money to go and explore for oil in Egypt. In terms of the Board and our advisors, we are very well served by the people we have. As are the shareholders.
M: On top of that, the exploration team that we have is a bit of a United Nations. Rick Cavaney, the exploration manager is a New Zealander. Jim Yates, who looks after our database and does a lot of our GIS work, is a Brit. Lars Allin is from Madagascar, a very good, solid technical geologist. Javier Arjuna is another solid field geologist with many years of experience. We have the right guys on the job, there's no doubt about it. They're very focused. One thing that always scares me is a geologist with a chequebook. I think that these guys are very focused on what they're doing. They understand it's a business, not a college geology project. They are focused on the end-goal, which is to make a major discovery and bring value to the shareholders, which is what I want them to do.
P: Great, thank you. A related question -- it sounds like you have the people for where the project is at now, would you also say that you have the people for the stages where the project will be in over the next few years and potentially longer term?
M: Yes, at the stage we're at now, we have the right people. In moving forward in making a discovery and looking to build a mine, we do have people that have done that. We have three mining engineers on the board of advisors. We do have engineering expertise that would be very helpful in moving that forward.
M: We're in a unique situation because the exploration team wouldn't be sidelined when you start to bring on mining engineers. As we were talking about earlier, when we get to the stage of building a mine at Hamama, we still have 40KM of other targets to do. We've got ongoing exploration for a long, long time. And that's not to mention the potential of possibly building another mine at Abu Marawat. It's hard to project out that far because we have so much here. But the exploration team that we have will carry on. One of the things we do is we're building that team. I look to do that in terms of bringing on people who want a long-term view, a career, as well as the Egyptians. The vast majority of our employees are Egyptian. We take and train young Egyptian geologists. We've got two eager beavers right now who are doing really well. We will then bring on more next year and train them. So, going out into the future, I want to have depth of expertise and younger people coming up. Not just a bunch of old guys, like me. That's very important to build that in and also to train the locals to be able to do it. Because the more you can build up expertise in-country, the less overhead you have with a lot of expatriates.
P: Again, thank you very much. Move on to a question: who owns this company? How much did they, or will they pay for it? When can they sell it?
M: They can sell it anytime they want to, I guess. But hopefully they don’t want to! We have several major shareholders. We have two private businessmen from Estonia who hold about 38% between them. We have a group called New Pacific, a Canadian company, that has a 12.4% stake. The total insiders own about 59% of the company, that includes directors and officers, which is about 10%. When you look at New Pacific and the Estonians, they participated to a large extent in the last capital raise of two million. In terms of the Estonians, they have always match-funded all financings and they want to maintain their position. They have indicated that, as we move forward, they will continue to be supportive and that's good. That's very important. Of course, we would like to bring in more people. We would like to expand the shareholder base and that's what we're looking to do now. We closed that financing. They have a four-month hold, but they've had that before and they've never sold any shares. We have very loyal shareholders, by and large.
P: Maybe a question for you, Mark. A few minutes ago you mentioned that you are the lowest paid guy in the operation. Do you have any comments on that in regards to ownership?
M: This is more to do with how I view things than anything else. We had issues in the past with people being paid too much. I think that money needs to be put into the ground. My job here is to ensure that it gets done. The way that I see that is, if I accomplish the goals that I've laid out that I want to get done and people, in the end, want to pay me something for that, then they're welcome to do so. I'm not going to pre-suppose anything until I actually deliver. I have some options but I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination the largest shareholder. Nor do I have a lot of cheap options or cheap shares. My salary will remain low, that's set in stone. It's not going to change until we're in a position where you can afford to pay somebody a lot of money to run the company.
P: Refreshing, thank you! Maybe one of the last off the list for us here. How much money do you have, how much money do you need to succeed, and how are you going to get it?
M: We have sufficient money to get through what we need to do in the short-term. Like every junior resource company, you live a real hand to mouth existence. The real point is that people give you some money to go and do the work, you show that you're making progress and you come back and get some more money.
M: The question of how much money we need in the next round is dependant upon what we see in terms of the geophysics. What we want to do is figure out how many meters we are going to want to drill. The rig is stacked and sitting there. We want to get back and get drilling again later this year. We've got the initial resource calculation coming out, and so there's a certain amount of work we need to be doing. The geophysics will direct us towards targeting those zones. The one thing you don't want to do is run a sort of 'roulette-style' drilling program. You want to make it targeted, so your potential of having successful drilling results are as high as possible. The geophysics, compared with putting a hole in the ground, is cheaper exploration. And it will define mineralization. So we think that's a very important step to take.
P: You’ve mentioned your personal commitment to putting money into the ground. Any statistics on hand regarding G&A versus exploration expense?
M: Egypt is an interesting place in one other factor -- it's a low cost environment to work in. Diesel costs are low. Water and food costs are low. We have skilled labour, but it's not expensive. We have all the infrastructure you could ever want or hope for! There's high-powered electricity lines going through our property, there's a railway going through it, and we've got highways, airports. We've got everything you could want. Funny enough, it's a bit like the oil and gas industry, because it's a cheap place to explore. You look at Abu Marawat and our finding costs are, what, fifteen dollars an ounce? The amount of money that you have to put in -- we get a lot of bang for our buck! We can do a lot with a couple of million dollars, whereas someone in DRC couldn't build a road! The economics here are very favourable.
P: Thank you very much. In that one and several other question, I really enjoyed hearing some of the things you had to say. Pleasure. If I could end by asking a few questions on things that came up.
M: Fire away!
P: You mentioned 'biggest discovery in Africa', just wondering how big?
M: How big do you want? One of the things I was saying to Blaine on the way here yesterday, it is very difficult for people sitting in Canada to get any sense of the size of what you have here. The sheer scale of it. I tried to take some pictures for the website that are sort of panoramic to try and give some idea of what that's like, but until you come and see it, it's very difficult. But if you imagine that we could very possibly have, at Hamama, somewhere in the neighbourhood, geographically, of three to six kilometers of strike length. And that's just Hamama! That doesn’t even incorporate the rest of the concession area. And then, what is the potential there at Abu Marawat? For me to say how big it could be? That would be such a shot in the dark that I wouldn't even attempt it. But, potentially, it has all the earmarks of something that could be world-class in size.
M: We have, within our own concession area, a district-wide potential. If you start thinking of districts where, geographically, within our one property, there are areas that are world-class districts. We have a mining district potentially in our own concession. Not many people can say that. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to think of anyone.
P: A related question -- you mentioned a possible extension of Abu Marawat that is in operation, if I heard that correctly?
B: The focus of Aton right now is Hamama. You've got the three zones have a strike length of approximately 3.5KM. Our work right now is focused on the western-most zone, or Hamama West, where we did a recent drill program and we are working towards an initial 43-101 Resource. At Abu Marawat, at the eastern-end, you have just shy of 400K ounces of gold. Just because we are conducting our work right now at Hamama doesn’t mean that Abu Marawat doesn’t have potential -- there are still targets. I am certain you could continue to add ounces there as well, but right now we feel that we are gonna get the most bang for the buck by continuing to drill-out Hamama West. And also looking to add extensions. As Mark was saying, there are possible extensions to the east and west that could make this go from anywhere from six kilometers to longer. We had a presentation last night on some of the other regional exploration targets that aren't even considered amongst the ten and it's clear that there is a lot of potential that we still don't even know about.
M: One of the things that remote sensing and spectral imaging is bringing up is that there are areas within our concession that are highly prospective and are worth going out and doing some work on -- some sampling and some mapping because we have just identified them. And that's the exciting thing about this concession area. We know what we know, but there is so much that is most likely there that we don't know of yet! The exploration team has a long shelf life. If we build a mine at Hamama or Abu Marawat, there's still so much exploration that can be done over the years. And that's why picking your team and looking at it long-term is so important. We look at it long-term. Our goal is to build a mining house based around what we have here. We take a long-term view. We're not promoters. We're not here for the short haul, we're here for the long haul.
P: If I could rephrase my question, I believe I heard you say that there was an extension to the Abu Marawat deposit that is outside of your concession?
M: No, it is not outside our concession. There is an area to the south called the Miranda Gossan. When you look at on the GIS with spectral imaging, it looks like it could potentially be an extension of Abu Marawat itself. The potential to add on to Abu Marawat was really my point. There's also more that we can do there.
P: Great, thanks very much for that. One other question that came up in the conversation -- the Ministry of Petroleum. I noticed a news release talking about how they had consulted with you or there was some discussion around reshaping policy and I wonder if you can provide any comments on the relationship between your company and the government?
M: Sure. I guess this goes back to what I was alluding to earlier in the interview regarding the history of mining there. That all evolved around that history, where mining basically went away in the fifties. The late fifties and early sixties, back when Amoco made two big discoveries. The oil and gas industry took off, and mining faded into oblivion. So, when Centamin came and started looking, all they had to draw from was the oil and gas production-sharing type agreements. That really needs to change because it's not really conducive to the mining industry. The Government understands that. We've talked with them and continue to talk with them, not just at the Ministry level but also with policymakers and others. We have a very good relationship with the Ministry of Petroleum. My own background and most of the people who work with me in the Cairo office, all come out of the oil and gas business, and have worked in Egypt in the oil and gas business. We are familiar with the Ministry. We know a lot of people there and that helps. I was involved with Centamin many years ago and so I got to know what was then called EGSM and is now called EMRA. I'm familiar with those folks as well. That helped a lot in our day to day relationship and in helping shape their mining industry in the future, which we want them to do! It's great for Egypt. We think it will be a major contributor to the economy and I think that what we can do to help them accomplish that is not just good for the industry, but good for the country in general.
P: Great. Well, I think I'm going to bring things a close here now. This has been Peter Bell talking with Mark Campbell and Blaine Monaghan from Aton Resources. Thanks very much for taking the call guys and providing all the commentary. Really compelling stuff.
M: Thank you, Peter.
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