LETTER TO THE EDITOR — Check on IPC assays called into

During the course of 20-plus years in the stock market, I have been involved with good ones (stocks) and bad ones. In the instance of International Platinum (IPC), what is out of the ordinary is that the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) took the unusual step of making a public commitment to the holders of IPC shares to “independently verify” the facts alleged by the corporation.

This it did not do. While it seems the TSE commissioned an effective procedure to assay samples from IPC’s Arizona property, it may not have sampled properly. The TSE samples may have been taken from a narrow area, or all from the top foot or two where, I gather, there is a shallow layer of overburden.

It would be ironic if, in its effort to protect investors and its own reputation, the TSE had inadvertently done just the opposite. If it turns out the TSE was somehow shortchanged by incompleteness in the work of its contractees, it will be the TSE and the IPC shareholders (who sold their shares on the TSE verification results) who will be the major losers in the long term.

In this case, the TSE would have frightened investors out of one of the larger gold mining plays in the U.S. in many years, as well as hurt a company and its president’s reputation — all in the process of only partially honoring its public promise.

In the final analysis, this project is either just cheap dirt or the shares are dirt cheap.

The way IPC President V.L.F. Furlong stayed available to investors and took it on the chin for two full days, following the TSE’s results, showed a lot of character and convinced me that, TSE results notwithstanding, he has really found something unusual and valuable in the Arizona desert. John Kuhn

H.C. Wainwright & Co.

Boston, Mass.