Catherine Delahunty, the NZX and the risk of not checking facts

Catherine Delahunty is a Green Party list MP, therefore it can be automatically assumed that she is anti mining. The Greens have been at the forefront of the push to stop the development of the Denniston Plateau mine on the West Coast. Bathurst Resources has just undertaken a capital raising exercise, which resulted in the issuing of 123 million new shares. These shares were issued at a price of $0.065NZ. I found all of this out by googling Bathurst Resources and looking at the NZX page for them. The reason I did this was this tweet that Catherine sent last night:

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Now, that doesn’t seem like much does it? Certainly not worth going to the hassle of looking up Bathurst’s NZX details and writing this blog. But it was the debate that followed that raised the point I am wanting to make.

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What has happened is, Catherine has relied on information that has been provided by an “informant”, hasn’t checked the information, has run with it, and is now defending being wrong when called on it. Below is a screen grab of the days information for Bathurst. It shows that as at 08:27pm on the 16th Bathurst was trading at 7 cents a share, sure it has fallen 14.63%, but considering the new shares were issued at 6.5 cents it is still ahead. What Catherine’s informant appears to have done is read the fall in value, at the time they read it 1 cent, as the value of the share not the fall. Bathurst may or may not be in good financial shape, but if an MP is going to make claims about share prices, or anything, they should check their facts first. Don’t blame your source, especially when it is something so simple to fact check.

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