Greatland Gold (LON: GGP) and its Nominated Advisor, SPARK, showed a clear lack of understanding of the AIM rule book this morning with its drilling update on the Havieron Project, located in Australia. The update in question gave a description of “all holes intersecting significant visible mineralisation” but no assay results to back up these claims.

Under the Note for Mining and Oil & Gas Companies exploration drilling updates are required under AIM Rule 11 but, as a minimum, the updates should include information on: “depth of zone tested; drilling intervals; and the average grades of mineralisation.”

The reason that the average grade of mineralisation should be included in every drilling update is to ensure that the report is not misleading. Without having the assay results to hand, even a very experienced geologist will not know the extent of the mineralisation within the sample, so it is impossible to assess if the drill results are significant without reviewing the assay results.

At the start of the release the Company refers to the assay results from previous drilling, already announced on 19/11/2018. These results returned high-grades over very large intercepts and were impressive, but to have these previously reported results above the visual description of the holes without any assays, adds to the distorting nature of the Greatland’s comments. These results from the 19/11/2018 were previously reported and have no reason to be included in a subsequent update regarding different drill holes.

To be clear, the results from drill holes HAD006-HAD009, could be very significant but they could also not be. We simply don’t know. No one does. Not even Greatland.

Greatland is by no means the only company to report visual descriptions of core without assay results, but it is important to remember that the MOGS are there to protect investors and anyone buying or selling shares in Greatland this morning is doing so on the basis on incomplete information