While Virginia Uranium Inc.’s (VUI) Project Manager, Patrick Wales, has talked about VUI’s dedication to uranium mining safety, its parent company, Virginia Energy Resources Inc. can’t even differentiate between “indicated resources” and “mineral reserves” in technical disclosures released on its website. This is especially odd given the significance of its ‘mistakes’.
One source found the following:
“The Company [VUI] filed a technical report dated September 6, 2012 titled “NI 43-101 Preliminary Economic Assessment Update, Coles Hill Uranium Property, Pittsylvania County, Virginia, United States of America” by Lyntek Inc. and BRS Engineering “in support of a listing application dated August 31, 2012. The technical report did not comply with the requirements of NI 43-101 and Form 43-101F1 because it incorrectly included wording that “the preliminary economic assessment…indicates that the portion of the [indicated] mineral resource…is economic under current conditions” (Indicated resources are simply economic mineral occurrences that have been sampled from locations such as outcrops, trenches, pits and drillholes to a point where an estimate has been made, at a reasonable level of confidence, of their contained metal, grade, tonnage, shape, densities, physical characteristics.).”
The source goes on to state, “With respect to the Company’s disclosure of the Coles Hill PEA on its website and corporate presentations, the economic analysis appears unbalanced because the Company discloses upside uranium price sensitivity without providing equal downside sensitivity.”
The point is that if Virginia Energy Resources cannot be forthright with its investors and potential investors about the economic opportunities the Coles Hill uranium deposit holds, Virginians in particular should be weary of claims made by any company affiliated with Virginia Energy Resources, including VUI.
A company’s integrity is measured by the sum of its parts. If one part of a company, in this case a parent company, willfully lies to its investors, it creates the perception that the company in question has a business culture that doesn’t respect, much less care about, the truth. More often than not, if one part of a company demonstrates improper business practices, it can be found throughout its daughter, sister and/or parent companies as well.
What Virginia Energy Resources demonstrated by its informational “inaccuracies” is its willingness to put profits above facts, the truth, and not inconceivably, the safety of its business practices in order to turn a greater profit. So why should Virginians trust that its daughter company, VUI, wouldn’t do the same to protect and enhance its profits?
The reason why I oppose uranium mining in Virginia goes beyond the fact that an ‘incident’ could have irrevocable harm on Virginia’s environment and the people living in that environment; it also has to do with the motives of those who would be performing the mining. In the case of VUI, its motives and that of its parent company are clear: profits over people and profits over truth.
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