Gord Stothart
Analyst · Credit Suisse
Thanks, Fahad. So I mean, obviously, with the M&A sort of leadership change with the changing gold price and I think somewhat the change in sentiment, plus all of the work that we’ve been doing on de-risking these projects, we are coming to a decision point with our Board and really sort of going through that strategic exercise right now. As we look at our company going forward, our existing assets, I love them to death, but they are getting older, and we’ll start to head into decline at some point in time. So we have a benefit, an incredible benefit compared to our peers of some great growth projects, each of them do different things for our company strategically. Boto is a nice tuck-in project, relatively straightforward to execute and has a very nice quick payback to it, but on a consolidated basis has less of a total impact on the company. Côté is a somewhat larger project. It’s still not a massive project by any means. In fact, when you look at Côté, it’s a smaller operation than Essakane and it’s a similar sized operation to Rosebel. So it’s sort of in our snack bracket in terms of operating, but the capital bill is higher. We have a strong balance sheet and we can manage it quite nicely actually. And we do recognize, there was some negative sentiment around some aspects of Côté in the marketplace. So on the positive side, it is – on a consolidated basis, it really does transform our company. We love both of those assets. It’s just – it’s a matter of right now of reaching a decision as to which one makes the most sense. I’ve been on the road with Indi pretty extensively the last month and have even more visits coming up with the investment community over the next couple of weeks to really help – do some talking obviously, but also do a lot of listening to the shareholders and understand how they see the decision and how they see the priorities so that we don’t end up surprising anybody with whichever decision we take going forward. Timeframe, personally, I’m restless. I’d like to see something decided here in the next two, three, four months. And at that point in time, then we’ll – we can – we’ll come forward. I wouldn’t expect, other than the numbers we talked about here for capital, I wouldn’t expect that either of those require any additional capital. And please note that the capital that we’re spending now is serving to reduce the post-decision capital. So this is money being spent towards an objective of achieving those projects. It’s not just moving sideways with the project still being pushed out. That’s how I sort of leave it with that, Fahad.