Under terms of the bid, Crosby has offered to buy all of Marathon’s ordinary shares, including those to be issued on the exercise of outstanding options for 68c per share.
Marathon chief executive John Santich told MiningNews.net the bid clearly and significantly undervalued the company and the board would not be recommending its shareholders to sell at 68c.
In its bid to soften up shareholders, Crosby listed a number of “significant risks” to shareholders, including project development risk and significant capital funding requirements; regulatory uncertainty over uranium mining; concentrated commodity price risk; uncertainty over the management’s capability to advance and develop projects; and lack of liquidity.
“Lots of those things are true, that’s the nature of the minerals industry, nobody’s arguing about that, we all know that, that is why you invest in companies that you hope make a discovery,” Santich said.
“That is the nature of the business.”
Santich described the concentrated commodity risk related to Marathon as a “furphy” and poured cold water over suggestions that the company’s management was not capable of advancing and developing projects.
“The only uncertainty is we haven’t developed our full development team, but quite clearly we have the skills and we have the track record in terms of developing projects,” he said.
“As for the lack of liquidity, I’m not sure that that is true, I think there is a fair amount of turnover, I think that the only pointer that they have there is, who would want to sell with the stock plummeting to 50c.
“There are plenty of reasons for that – the end of the financial year, the state of the market generally, and the fact that we’ve had a bit of difficulty getting our assays in on time from the laboratories.”
Santich said Crosby has taken the stock at a long-time low and applied a “fantastic” premium, but have failed to take a long-term view.
“They’ve done it before, they recognise value when they see it, they’ll take it out, pull it apart and put it back in for $200 million and they’ll have the profits instead of our shareholders,” Santich said.
“I hope we can manage to demonstrate to shareholders there is value there, but on the other hand, it’s good to see somebody come out of the woodwork and say ‘hey, this stock is undervalued, let’s buy it’
“Let’s face it, Crosby are not going to pay full value for anything, it’s a banker’s bid, and that’s what you do when you’re in that sort of business, you look for something that is undervalued and you try and buy it.”
Marathon is exploring the Paralana mineral system in the North Flinders Rangers, which hosts the company’s Hodgkinson and Mt Gee uranium deposits.
The advanced Mt Gee deposit has an inferred resource of 57 million tones at 0.06% uranium oxide for 33,000t of contained uranium oxide, while recent drilling at Hodgkinson returned hits of 23m at 0.15% uranium oxide, including 1m at 1.15%.
Marathon also has a portfolio of copper-gold-uranium properties in the Gawler Craton, South Australia, along with copper-gold properties in western Victoria.
Shares in the company, which hit a 52-week high of $1.45 in April, remained unchanged during morning trade at 55c, capitalising the company at $24 million.
