November
16, 2010
Dear Paul
Wang:
Please
excuse my delayed response to your letter of November 8, 2010. I have been away
from my Reno office for several days. I am still away, but now have
the opportunity to respond, and will do so now. Before beginning, I
will state for the record that since you chose to ignore the remaining
shareholders that are party to the Schedule 13-D and directed your letter to me
personally, you may consider the contents of this letter to be my personal
opinion and response. The other shareholders may
register their own opinion to your letter.
To
be blunt, I believe that your letter is a farcical distortion of reality and a
slap in the face to the shareholders of this company (with the exception of a
few shareholders, such as Mr. Carrington). I cannot see that it
says anything of substance relative to GMC, and I believe you should be
embarrassed for writing it. The people that have invested their
money in this company are the ones that have a right to be disappointed, not
you, and believe me, many shareholders are.
The
implication that we as shareholders have not tried to work constructively with
you and the present board is patently absurd and
misleading. In the midst of a huge gold bull market this
company seems to be going nowhere and is, based on the information I have at my
disposal, on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the past several
months, a number of substantial shareholders, myself included, have expressed
extreme concern over this and, as you very well know, have made numerous
requests to the board for open, honest, and substantive communication regarding
any plans you may have for reversing the downward trend of this company and
moving it forward to success. The board has, on every occasion,
completely, and blatantly, refused to comply with these requests, and your
latest letter is merely a continuation of the board’s refusal to communicate
substantively with the shareholders of this company, or even recognize the major
problems and important issues facing GMC.
Response
to Specific Points Raised in Your Letter:
Your
statement that “the BOD is working extremely hard to improve the shareholder
value and the stock has traded at a near 52 week high recently”, would be
laughable if the situation with GMC were not so serious. You seem to
be quite proud that GMC recently traded as high as six cents, and appear to be
touting this as a major accomplishment of yours. The price of
GMC stock, only a few days later, has fallen to less than five cents, are you
also responsible for this decline? Of course not, you and I both know
that this is normal market movement! GMC stock has been trading in a
range between two cents and six cents for months, because it is (hopefully)
bouncing along the bottom and, to my knowledge, management has done nothing that
would cause the share price to break out of this range to the
upside. It is beyond me why you think you are responsible
for this movement and why you would want to claim responsibility for what is
basically a very dismal situation.
More
importantly, in case you are unaware, there are shareholders in this group that
have acquired GMC stock at 12.5 cents. In fact, there are GMC
shareholders (not a part of this group) that have invested in GMC at well over
30 cents per share. Considering the raging gold market we are
currently in, do you really think that shareholders would agree that a share
price of six cents is something to proud of?
In my
opinion, your letter says nothing to address the problems and concerns the
company is facing, and is, in fact, blatantly ignoring
them. Personally, I have seen nothing that makes me think the board
is working at all, much less extremely hard; however, considering the lack of
positive results generated, if the Board has been working extremely hard, or
even believes it has been working extremely hard, then it should acknowledge
that it has failed, and have the decency and consideration to immediately step
aside and allow the shareholders to replace them with a board that can deliver
results. With a more committed and capable board, we would at least
have a chance, at this very late date, to save the company and the investment of
so many shareholders.
I found
your statement that all directors have personally purchased shares of GMC to be
very interesting. If this is true, these purchases, to my knowledge,
have not been appropriately reported under SEC rules. I make this
statement based on my reading of the insider ownership disclosure reports
required to be made public by the SEC for benefit of stockholders. I
also note that you made no mention of how large these new shareholdings acquired
by the directors are. I suspect they are quite small, but I am
most interested to find out for sure.
Your
letter makes it clear that you intend to personally control all communications
between us, as a shareholder group, and the board of directors as a
whole. I would like to point out that, in spite of what you may
believe, you are an employee of GMC, not its dictator. Your demand to
control and screen stockholder communications addressed to the entire board is
very much in line with how you have been running this company, and how, Mr.
Carrington, ran it before your arrival. It demonstrates, in no
uncertain terms, the arrogance and corporate governance shortcomings of the
current Board and the problems that can arise when only one member of a five
member board is independent. As it would be inappropriate to do
otherwise, I will continue to freely correspond with the entire board of
directors on any matters concerning the company.
A good
portion of your letter is dedicated to providing informal suggestions regarding
the SEC filing requirements of our shareholder group. You
should concern yourself with your own SEC filing obligations rather than
discussing ours. For example, I note that you are currently
delinquent with regard to your Securities Exchange Act, Section 16 reporting
requirements. In fact, it appears to me that you have filed
none to date. More importantly, any time you spend
thinking about our filing requirements would be much better spent responding
aggressively, quickly, and effectively to resolving the problems facing this
company.
You
raised the topic of short sales in your letter. This, as the rest of
your letter, is a feeble attempt to deflect attention away from the real matters
concerning GMC. We have no intention of selling GMC shares
short. In fact, given the significant long positions of each member
of our group, the very suggestion of short sales with regard to our shareholder
group is ludicrous.
In case
you have forgotten, I have on several previous occasions expressed to you what
are, in my opinion, the real matters of concern facing GMC. Let me
restate them for you one more time:
1) You
and the current Board have failed to remedy, or even present a plan that might
remedy, the serious liquidity crisis facing GMC.
2) You
and the current Board have refused to discuss, present, or implement any plan
that might be effective in generating the investor interest necessary to move
GMC forward to its stated goals of gold production, cash flow generation, and
higher share prices.
3) The
company’s SEC filing leads me to believe that the company is in dire straits,
unable to pay its bills, and on the verge of going
bankrupt. Not only have you, Mr. Powell, and Mr. Carrington
failed to resolve, or even attempt to resolve these very serious issues, you
seem to be unaware that they even exist. In an attempt to save
this company before it is too late we have requested that you, Mr. Carrington,
and Mr. Powell voluntarily resign your positions as officers and directors so
that we may install a competent board of directors and management
team. If you are unwilling to tender your immediate resignation, we
have requested that you call a meeting of the shareholders as quickly as
practicable under SEC rules so that the shareholders may have the opportunity to
remove you from office and replace you with competent and committed
management. As has been the case in the past, you have refused
to even acknowledge these requests, and leave us no choice but to again demand
that the Board call a meeting of shareholders as soon as
practicable.
In
regards to calling a shareholder meeting, I would like to point out that GMC
should be having an annual meeting soon according to its usual calendar
schedule. Why has the board not announced a date for the next shareholder
meeting? Furthermore, why has the board not announced the deadline
for submitting stockholder proposals for the next stockholder
meeting?
GMC is
required to disclose, in its annual proxy statement, the deadline for
shareholders wishing to submit proposals for consideration at the next annual
stockholder meeting. The board has failed to do this. In
its definitive proxy statement dated March 25, 2010, GMC states that the
deadline for submitting stockholder proposals is March 1, 2010. The
proxy requirements clearly call for disclosure of the deadline for submitting
stockholder proposals relating to the next annual meeting, not the same annual
meeting, described in the proxy statement. Learning about a deadline after the
fact is not very helpful.
In truth
Paul, based on what I have seen to date, I have no idea why you and Mr. Powell
even accepted positions on the board of this
company. Based on what Mr. Carrington told me about you
and Mr. Powell prior to the time you became involved with the company, I had
high hopes that the two of you would be providing strong and capable management,
and the financial strength necessary to get GMC turned around and moving toward
success. I had optimistic feelings about Mr. Carrington’s leadership
ability when we first met; however, that optimism vanished after months of
inactivity, and unfortunately, the same is happening under your
leadership.
While I
am certainly not privilege to the inner workings of this company, I can see
nothing that the current management has done, is doing, or even plans to do,
that would increase shareholder value and improve the prospects of
GMC. You have had more than enough time to develop and
implement a plan to move this company forward, and, for whatever reason, have
not done so. This company has good assets and, properly managed
and promoted, its share price should be moving strongly upward in today’s
market, unfortunately, under the current management team, this is just not
happening.
The
shareholders of this company have invested a substantial amount of money in
supporting and developing GMC to this point, and do not wish to see it
needlessly fail. It is unfair that you and Mr. Powell, who have
invested little or nothing in GMC and are directors only at the insistence of
Mr. Carrington, should continue to maintain an iron grip on the management of
this company and intentionally prevent shareholders from having the opportunity
to try and save this company by replacing you with a team that they believe will
have the ability to succeed, where you have not. In fairness to
all, I again request that you, Mr. Powell, and Mr. Carrington voluntarily step
aside and allow the shareholders to select a team of their
choosing.
In
closing, I would like to mention that I have had the opportunity to review your
GMC press release of November 11, 2010. At first glance I was
quite hopeful that you were announcing something of significance, but quickly
saw that was not the case. In fact, why you wrote and release this PR
is not clear to me as it says absolutely nothing of substance regarding GMC, or
the MOU itself, which is supposedly the topic of the
release. Of course, it does strongly imply that the MOU
is quite beneficial to the company, and, no doubt, many investors and potential
investors took it to mean just that. Hopefully, when more
details of the MOU are known, they will not be disappointed.
Your PR
did provide interesting information regarding Gold Canyon Mining and the
equipment they use; however, since this is a public announcement, you should be
aware that Catipllar is actually spelled Caterpillar.
Regards,
Michael
D. Duncan, Shareholder
Cc: Board
of Directors, General Metals Corporation