Toro Extraordinary General Meeting

Toro Extraordinary General Meeting
By Mia Pepper, MPI Board

The Mineral Policy Institute bought shares in Toro Energy Pty Ltd in 2012 with donations from a number of anti nuclear supporters. Toro is a small inexperienced Adelaide based uranium company with no operation mines. Their flagship project is the Wiluna uranium project the front runner for WA’s first uranium mine. They have conditional approval to mine uranium at Wiluna but no financing to make the project a reality. However they have acquired a number of neighbouring uranium deposits increasing their uranium assets by 42%.

MPI Director Charles Roache, and MPI board member Mia Pepper attended the extraordinary general meeting in October where the company discussed the acquisition of the Lake Maitland uranium deposit owned by Canadian company Mega.

Before the extraordinary general meeting MPI joined with the Conservation Council of WA to call on the ASX to investigate company statements in regards to the Wiluna uranium project and their various other assets in the region, statement we believed were misleading shareholders about the deposits included in the Wiluna uranium project which have conditional environmental approval and those that do not.

The ASX investigated this complaint causing Toro Energy some embarrassment during their extraordinary meeting. MPI Director dominated question time at the extraordinary general meeting with some prickly questions on the economics of uranium mining and the health of the nuclear industry.

Toro’s outlook on the uranium market was overly optimistic placing a lot of emphasis on the unpredictable restart of Japans reactors. Toro has made attempts to improve the economics of the project by expanding the volume of uranium available to them and reducing costs by proposing the use of a single processing facility for five uranium deposits. This kind of proposal is actively being challenged through the EPA and other means with grave concerns over the processing facility location, ore transportation risks, radioactive mine waste tailings disposal and transport and the water availability and management.

Toro are desperately seeking a partner to fund the project which still needs a range of approvals and permits before construction can begin. They currently have $9 million cash ($3.5 which will go in costs on the acquisition of Mega’s Lake Maitland project).
Toro’s Annual General Meeting is on the 28th of November at QV1 Conference Centre, Training Room 1, Level 2, 250 St Georges Terrace. Annual report is available here. http://www.toroenergy.com.au/?post_type=reports&p=1413&preview=true