Thursday, August 20, 2009

Petaquilla (PTQ.to): LatAm's worst miner about to hit a serious cash crunch

We've documented just how bad this mining company really is on several occasions.

  • We've mentioned the as-yet unpaid multi-million dollar environmental fines imposed by the government for reckless disregard for the law, the land and the people around the mine.

But we haven't mentioned the big big financial problems at PTQ.to yet.



If we check out the working capital position at PTQ.to, we see that according to the last earnings report it is in deficit to the tune of $7.7m or so. OUCH.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Now that's a lot of money for such a pisspoor company, but the progress towards PTQ.to imminent cash crunch has now been made that much quicker by recent rulings from Panama's government. According to latest reports, in order for the company to make itself legal and get the licences it needs to operate, it will have to:

1) Pay its outstanding fines to the Environment agency ANAM that amount to U$1.93m

2) Pay its amount outstanding to the MICI commerce ministry, precisely $900,000

3) Deposit U$14.3m at ANAM as a bond to cover any future environmental fines caused by the company as well as final clean up charges.

And the funniest thing is that so far not a single dollar of the above U$17.3m is set aside as contingency by the company, so somehow they have to add all this burden on to the books in order to get a licence to operate. Or in other words, I sure hope you're not long PTQ.to right now, dude, because if you are there's a financially religious experience coming your way very soon. DYODD.