Paul Cronin: What It Really Takes to Build a Mine

Trevor Hall (0:05)

Hey, good morning, happy Friday, everybody. Welcome back to another Long Form Episode here on Mining Stock Daily. It's a good one. Welcoming back an old friend, coming off a huge win from Adriatic Metals, that former CEO and now CIO at Admiralty Fund Resource Fund, Mr. Paul Cronin.

He is responsible for making, taking an overlooked historical asset in Bosnia, pushing it through exploration, development, construction, ultimately production. We talk about that path, the ebbs and flows, the challenges that came along with that story, and then the lessons he learned along the way, and what other management teams in this sector now, and investors can learn from his trials and tribulations. So great conversation with Paul. It's been a long time since we've had him on. Glad he could make the time.

Special thank you to Integra Resources, Equinox Gold, Visa Silver and Revival Gold for their continued support of Mining Stock Daily. Also, a big thank you to Terrahutton for showing up to Colorado the last couple weeks. Guys, I got a chance to look at some of the stuff they're working on within the Terrahutton platform. It is so freaking cool of what they're doing and using the video. And the motto is making the invisible investable and they are just knocking out the park. I'd highly recommend setting up a meeting with them and checking out how they're using digital storytelling to help mining companies. It's a very cool product, so special thank you to Terrahutton for coming out, sharing some of that time with us the last two weeks. All right, let's jump into my conversation with the one and only Paul Cronin. Have a wonderful weekend, everybody, and be well. There was a presence that was certainly missed the last couple of weeks here in Colorado. Mr. Paul Cronin, it's good to have you back on the podcast. It has been a while, but yeah, having you not at Beaver Creek, I must say like there was something was a little bit off last week, but it's good to have you on the podcast.

Paul Cronin (2:17)

Well, thanks very much for having you, Trevor. I appreciate it. Yeah, I missed Beaver Creek this year.

I'm sorry I did. I heard it was a very interesting event. I had a few obligations here that I couldn't be away for.

Trevor Hall (2:30)

Yeah, I completely understand.

Listen, I think I don't think we need to do much of an introduction. In fact, I'd like to just jump right into the conversation. I do want, it's almost like a post-mortem conversation because when you were CEO of Adriatic, you and I from time to time would jump on Connect and give us those corporate updates, and Adriatic is no longer. DPM has taken over that project in Bosnia and Herzegovina. So I guess this conversation, I think, if we may spend as much time as we can, kind of post-mortem a little bit and also talk about what you've been up to recently with the fund.

But I do want to spend a lot of time, because I think it's worthwhile kind of digging down after spend some time kind of talking about the beginnings of Adriatic all the way to that next chapter, to the final chapter you had with it. But take me back to the beginning of Adriatic. How does an Australian financier and commodity guy end up looking at an old mining district in Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what did you see at that time that most everybody else had missed?

Paul Cronin (3:48)

Well, I think you could probably go back a little bit earlier than that. You know, prior to Adriatic, I was working at RMB Resources, which is the resource fund of First Rand Bank. And we had a fairly sizable debt and equity book, primarily investing in junior mining companies. I think working in the fund and seeing a number of management teams, you would feel that enthusiasm that management teams had about their projects and assets and what they wanted to do. You'd also over time start to see the flaws in some of the way management teams were going about things. But I guess there was almost a romanticism. We're thinking, I'd love to go and run a project. And when I decided to leave the bank, I went to work in corporate development for a small ASX Uranium company that was developing an ISR asset in Turkey.

That was always going to be an uphill battle in 2013, 14, 15 with the Uranium price coming off after Fukushima. But we got that asset as advanced as I think we could with our size of balance sheet and eventually sold that into a US Uranium producer.