Ticker: MILI.CN / MILIF
Category: Mining / Antimony
I rarely find people talking about this stock, so I wanted to bring up a discussion regarding the massive drop yesterday following the Slovakian government’s abrupt cancellation of their exploration license over "unspecified reasons."
For context: Their flagship mine, Trojarova, is considered a top 2 antimony asset in the EU. They just published an NI 43-101 technical report proving 67,000 tonnes of antimony .. this is a heavy de-risking event. They also hold two other exploration assets in the same country: Tiennesgrund (Antimony) and Medvedi (Tin). I won’t get into more details, you can prompt Gemini to know more about the company / team.
Catalyst worth noting: Apart from the obvious global Antimony push independence, EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) for a domestic Antimony supply chain and Slovakia literally very recently submitting Trojarova to the EU as an officially designated strategic asset to break reliance on China.
My hypothesis: Market is pricing this as a permanent ban, but I think there is something classic and fishy about this. I suspect this is a hostage-style renegotiation.
\- Why did Ministry of the Environment cancel the Trojarova license, but leave the Tiennesgrund and Medvedi licenses completely untouched? If this were a pure, ideological anti-mining purge to win local votes, they would have swept the entire portfolio and kicked MILIF out of the country, no?
\- Why did this come just 2 days after NI 43-101? It’s like they were waiting for the asset to derisk to bring MILIF to the negotiation table and force their cards. I think the government buys how worthy the mine is. Making a mining company spend their money for exploration and taking a stake for further operation feels textbook to me.
\- Complete lack of justification. No environmental breaches, zoning breaches etc., If the closure was for an actual hardcore failure, why not cite a hard environmental citation instead of leaving door for petition?
What do you guys think about this situation?
Position: 100k shares. I’m honestly totally fine if this goes down to 0. I’m invested because I felt they were heavily underpriced and are in an amazing spot considering the geopolitical tailwinds for Antimony. I see good asymmetry and I want them to succeed. I hypothesized that they could be EU’s PPTA but again, fuck do I know 🤷🏼♂️