News

December 10, 2008

Mariana Resources Convinces One Of South America’s Preeminent Silver Companies To Pay Its Bills For A While

By Alastair Ford

Not so long ago, Joe Lunn, star analyst at Finncap, was forced to work through the weekend by the bosses at Mariana Resources, which is one of Finncap’s growing stable of clients. This was no bad thing, although perhaps not from Joe’s perspective. But Mariana is a company that once-upon-a-time was accused of ignoring the needs of the London market – accused of a take the money and run attitude, to put it another way – so it’s nice to see it nailing the London side of things down, to make sure that the message gets out, even to the extent that its brokers are forced to work the weekend. Joe, to his credit, has always liked the Mariana story, and when it came to the matter of working the Saturday and the Sunday his real gripe wasn’t the work itself, it was battling through the inevitable weekend disruptions to the UK’s transport network. For the benefit of any bush-bound readers or happy-go-lucky Aussies or Canadians, anyone here in the UK who can actually remember a single day when the British public transport system operated a fully operational and normal service across the board with no disruptions, for engineering work or otherwise, is either very, very old, or living in with the CS Lewis and Tolkien characters in fantasy-land.

The weekends are the worst. But at least for Joe, the battle with the trains was worthwhile, because Mariana had been putting out a string of good news, and for a classic exploration play - a type of company that you might expect to be looking particularly vulnerable at a time like this - some of it was very sensible stuff regarding money. The key announcement came out on 17th November and detailed how, on the strength of a two-year right of first refusal over certain exploration...