Hello, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Dundee Corporation. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Peter Nixon, Chair of the company. Mr. Nixon, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and again, welcome to the Dundee Corporation’s 2022 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I will now call the meeting to order. As Chair of the company, I will chair today's meeting. To ensure the health and safety of our shareholders, colleagues, and communities, we are using the power of technology to enable our shareholders to attend this meeting in a virtual format via live webcast. This format allows all shareholders and appointed proxy holders from any location to attend, participate, and vote at the meeting. Guests are also welcome to listen to our meeting and will be able to participate in a Q&A session following the formal portion of the meeting.
As this meeting is being held virtually, we would like to set out a few rules for the orderly conduct of the meeting. First, questions in respect of a motion can be submitted by any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxyholder using the instant messaging service of the virtual interface. Please note that there may be a slight delay in questions being submitted to us. When asking a question, please follow the instructions in the virtual platform, which will ask you to indicate your name, which entity you represent, if any, and confirm whether you are a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxyholder.
When reading out a question, we will note the name of the registered shareholder or proxyholder submitting the question. In order to deal with all questions in a timely fashion, questions of a similar nature will be answered once, and duplicate of questions will not receive a response. Questions on the formal meeting items will be addressed as each item is tabled. Any questions received of a more general nature will be addressed at the end of the meeting. If we are unable to address your general question during the meeting, a representative of Dundee will reach out to you following the meeting with a response.
For the purposes of the meeting today, voting on all matters will be conducted by electronic ballot. To allow sufficient time for voting, the polls will be open at the beginning of the meeting, and you will receive a message on the virtual interface requesting you to start registering your votes. I remind you that only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxyholders who have properly logged in with their control numbers or username will be able to see on the screen all motions being brought forth at this meeting and will be asked to vote on each business item. We remind you that if you are a registered shareholder and you have already voted by proxy, you need not vote again unless you wish to change your vote.
If you plan to vote at the meeting, you may choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait to cast your vote until after an item is discussed or following the conclusion of discussions on all voting matters. To vote, simply click on your choice for or withhold or against as applicable. A confirmation message will appear to show your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply change your selection. The votes you have submitted on each polling item at the time the poll closes will be recorded. Totals in favor or against or withheld, as the case may be, for each resolution item will be tallied by the scrutineers once the voting is completed.
I'll report on the outcome of all motions at the end of the meeting. We will now proceed with the formal portion of today's meeting. To expedite the formal part of the meeting, I will move all motions as the proxy appointee. With me on the webcast, we have Jonathan Goodman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Lila A. Manassa Murphy, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I would like to thank all our board members for their continued support and wise counsel during the year. Following the termination of the formal part of the meeting, we will have a presentation and we'll also respond to questions.
I now ask that the 2022 annual meeting of the shareholders of the company come to order and declare the polls open on all resolutions. Mark Pereira, Vice President and Corporate Secretary of the company, will act as Secretary of the meeting. For the purposes of this meeting, I appoint Computershare Investor Services as scrutineers to compute the votes of any polls taken at this meeting and to report thereon to the Secretary. The items of business for today's meeting are set out in the Management Proxy Circular of the company dated May 11, 2022. This year, we mailed to shareholders using notice and access and delivered your meeting materials by providing you with a notice and posting materials on our website at www.dundeecorporation.com, only mailing materials to shareholders who previously requested paper copies.
Unless there is any objection, which may be voiced only by registered shareholders or duly appointed proxyholders, by using the instant messaging services of the virtual interface, I will dispense with the reading of the notice of meeting. Copies of the Management Proxy Circular and other meeting materials are available under the company's profile on the SEDAR website. As no objections have been received, we will continue. Our transfer agent, Computershare Investor Services, Inc., has attested to the proper mailing.
One moment, please. Pardon me. This is the operator. I apologize, but there'll be a slight delay in today's conference. One moment, please. The conference will be resumed shortly.
I am back, and I apologize. My phone line failed. However, continuing with the meeting. As the first item of business on the agenda for today's meeting, I present the audited consolidated financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2021, together with the auditor's report to the shareholders thereon. Copies of such documents have been mailed to the shareholders who requested them and have also been posted on SEDAR and our website. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditor of the company for the ensuing year and to authorize the directors of the company to fix the auditor's remuneration.
The Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of the company has approved, subject to shareholder confirmation, the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, as the auditor of the company. I move that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP be appointed the auditor of the company until the next annual meeting of shareholders and that the Board of Directors be authorized to fix the auditor's remuneration. Unless there are any questions, I will move to the next item of business. The next and final item of business is the election of directors. In accordance with the Advance Notice Bylaws of the company for nomination of directors by shareholders, we did not receive any notice of any director nomination for this year's meeting.
Accordingly, the only persons eligible to be nominated for election as directors of the company are the persons nominated by management. The seven directors to be elected by the shareholders of the company shall hold office until the next annual meeting of shareholders of the company or until their successors are elected or appointed. Tanya Covassin, Jonathan Goodman, Isabel Meharry, Andrew Molson, Allen Palmiere, Murray Sinclair, and myself, Peter Nixon, have been nominated as directors for the ensuing year or until their successors are elected or appointed. Each of the persons nominated has confirmed that he or she is prepared to serve as a director.
Since there are no other nominations, I move a motion to elect each of the individuals nominated as directors. As mentioned, voting today is being conducted by electronic ballot. I will now take a moment for registered shareholders and appointed proxy holders to complete voting. For those of you who have not yet cast your votes, please do so now. We will provide registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders approximately 30 more seconds to complete the electronic ballots. Once the electronic balloting closes, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will automatically be submitted. I would ask that the scrutineer compile the report regarding the results of voting on all business matters.
However, I have been advised that based on the proxies we have received to date, all voted overwhelmingly in favor of all the matters today. 99.97% have voted in favor of the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the auditor of the company and to authorize the Board of Directors of the company to fix their remuneration. Each of the seven nominees received no less than 99.53% votes in favor of his or her election as a director of the company to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.
I declare that PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has been duly appointed as the auditor of the company and that each of the seven nominees have been duly elected as directors of the company for the ensuing year. I confirm that the results will be published on SEDAR and by press release following this meeting. The formal items of business as set out in the notice of meeting have been addressed. I move that this meeting now terminate. As there is no further business to come before the meeting, I declare the formal part of the meeting to be concluded. With that, I will now turn things over to Jonathan Goodman to provide an overview of the company's operations and to highlight certain strategic initiatives. Jonathan.
Thank you, Peter. Once again, welcome to our Annual Meeting of 2022. I am very happy with the progress that we have made at Dundee Corporation since I returned in 2018, and we are turning our full attention now to having our share price reflect the work that we have done over the last few years. Since 2018, we've reduced our full-time employees from 69 to around 24 today. We've reduced our real estate footprint by over 90%. We have reduced our debt to almost zero and reduced the book value of our preferred shares from over CAD 210 million to CAD 78 million today. We still have more to do.
At the same time, we have recognized a generational opportunity to invest in the mining sector and have built a mining team that is, in our view, second to none, and reworked our plan to achieve success. Dundee Corporation is an active investor focused on delivering long-term sustainable value as a trusted partner in the mining sector. This is an especially important statement to us. We are active investors, not passive. We roll up our sleeves and get involved. We are investors, not advisors. All of our advice is about helping to achieve success, and our interests are aligned with management. We are long-term. We do not actively trade our stock and are prepared to own these investments for many years.
We believe in sustainability. We're not involved in ESG as a box ticker. We see it as a critical part of a company's risk mitigation strategy and expect all of our investee companies to buy in. We are partners. We see ourselves as a partner in our investee companies and work with the management groups to help them add value. Our share price has been flat since September of 2018, and that is where we are now focusing our efforts. We do not believe that our share price accurately reflects our current value and prospects. Our value proposition is extremely attractive.
We believe that our net asset value, which mostly consists of our public market portfolio of investments at market value, which we believe are trading at a discount, private investments of what we believe is a conservative value and debt securities at book value, is around CAD 3.40 per share. That gives us a holding company discount of around 60%. This is too high. Traditionally, these discounts range between 10% and 30% of net asset price. Even ignoring our private portfolio, we're trading at a 34.4% discount to the net of our public portfolio, plus our cash, less our preferred at market.
How are we fixing it? First, since 2018, we've been rationalizing our portfolio of private non-mining businesses. Last year, we sold the Blue Goose Cattle business for around CAD 71.1 million. In addition, we have been paid out over CAD 15 million for the Eight Capital debt. We have more to do, but the toughest deals are behind us. We have a plan and are working on executing on every one of our non-core assets. Second, we have streamlined our capital structure. Since 2020, we've bought back almost 40% of our preferred shares and around 14% of our common. We currently have an issuer bid in place and will at some point do more.
Right now, we are focused on our core business and making sure that we have enough capital to make our business plan work. In that same time, we have dramatically reduced our cash G&A run -rate, and continue to reduce it in a meaningful way. Third, we have also focused on doing more private equity style mining deals. Over the last several years, we've acquired significant positions in over eight mining businesses. Our mining team is actively engaged on banking and advisory mandates, which generate some fees that go to cover some of our overheads. The fourth leg of the strategy is to obtain direct access to cash flows by acquiring direct ownership interest in mining operations.
There are two ways to realize your value in mining stock. The first is to sell the stock for competitive price to another company. The second is to get a stream of dividends or a piece of the cash flow directly. In today's market, many smaller development companies are trading at between 20%-40% of their ultimate value. Even a 40% premium is not really a fair price. For a long-term investor, we're comfortable maintaining our interest in a private company if we have a fair deal and we trust the operator. We are equipped to operate beyond capital markets with our team of geologists, metallurgists, and mining engineers.
When the value proposition tilts in favor of direct ownership of mines, we will capitalize on these opportunities for our shareholders. These cash flows should support our share price and dramatically reduce the discount. Our first deal with this plan is the takeover of Big River Gold by Aura Minerals. We own a little over 19% of Big River, and we will own around 20% of the Borborema Gold Mine when the acquisition is complete. We will pay our share of the equity portion of the capital required and are looking forward to being partners with Aura Minerals. Why Aura? They are a first-class company, which is well run and well-funded. They are very experienced in Brazil. In fact, they are Brazilian.
They have excellent ESG practices and are a particularly good allocator of capital. We are looking forward to this future partnership very much as our interests are aligned. Why mining? The world is and has been transforming at an incredible pace. There are two themes that we see that bodes well for mining investment for the long term. The gold story. In 2000, the U.S. debt to GDP was around 57%. Today, it's almost 130%. Over that same time, the gold price has gone from an average of $279 per ounce to over $1,840 yesterday. As democracy has been replaced by populism, governments have learned that to hold on to power, they must spend more and tax less. This is not sustainable.
Gold is and has been able to hold its value over the long term. Whether you see it as a hedge against inflation or a hedge against debt levels or even just a long-term store of value, it has worked. In today's environment, the Fed is raising rates, and this puts downward pressure on gold in the short term. Most pundits believe that the Fed will raise rates by 300 basis points. U.S. government debt at around $30 trillion, 300 basis points will add $900 billion to the annual deficit. The government spending cuts and tax hikes required to even try to balance the budget are scary and quite frankly, impossible.
While gold is not a perfect hedge, and we do not even pretend to know what it will do over the next year, we are confident that when we look back in five, 10– 20 years' time, it will have done its job. Climate change. The debate about whether climate change is real is over. What the final effects of climate change will be is debatable, but it's almost a foregone conclusion that the world will continue to wean itself off of fossil fuels over the next 20 years. To do that, battery technology will have to play a critical role. Metals like copper, nickel, palladium, cobalt, zinc, manganese, lithium, platinum, silver, and uranium will all need to be produced in much greater quantities.
This, combined with the geopolitics around us not relying on China and Russia for our metals, will bode well for the future of the mining industry. At the same time, the mining industry has gone through a major multiple contraction. Mark Twain once said that a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top. He was right. The promoters in the mining sector over the bull market during the first 10 years of this century dramatically overpromised and underdelivered. As a result, the greater investment community abandoned junior mining stocks.
Ask any major investment manager or retail broker at any of the big banks what junior mining stocks they hold, and they will give you a lecture on risk and how they do not play those stocks. For the better part of the decade, they have been right. Our investment strategy has been designed around doing our own work and not trusting the published data. We have set up our company with an all-star team of industry professionals. For our major investments, we almost always sign a CA, download the raw data ourselves, and do our own interpretation. We share those results with the investee companies and provide them with a peer review.
We help the companies that we invest in achieve their business plan. For us, it gives us confidence to invest in undervalued, high-quality mining companies that can be profitable at any point in the cycle. We de-risk these investments through a comprehensive due diligence methodology, analyzing geological, technical, social, business, and political risks. We make informed, disciplined, long-term investment decisions and do not take exorbitant fees on the deal fee structure. It also gives us the ability to make sure that the company is rigorously evaluating risks and utilizing good ESG practices. ESG, for many industries, has become a box-checking exercise and a marketing tool.
For us, in mining, it's essential. When you build a mine, you must get the environmental aspect right. Getting it wrong will lead to failure. Same goes for the social side of the mining business. In fact, if the local community does not support the mine, the mine will rarely get built. As far as governance is concerned, it is also essential. We say that ESG is doing well by doing good. I will now talk about some of our more significant investments. We'll start with Reunion Gold, which is our largest investment. Reunion Gold is the owner of the Oko West project in Guyana.
The discovery was made over the last several years and is shaping up to be one of the most significant new discoveries in the industry. We own around 17% of the company. This is a very significant discovery in a mining-friendly country. While they have not yet published a resource, there are characteristics of the deposit that gets us very excited. The first 70 meters of the deposit are saprolite, which is a weathered rock that will need little to no blasting or crushing. This means that the start of the mine will be very low cost and likely have a very quick payback, as other mines in the area have had.
The deposit also appears to be bound by strong granitic rocks, which are very stable and should allow for open pits that go quite deep, and also have a lower waste to ore ratios, which will also contribute to a long life, low-cost mine. The company will put out its first reserve statement in the next few months, but we believe it will be only the beginning. Magna Mining. Magna has a market cap of around CAD 30 million. They are developing the fully permitted Shakespeare mine near Sudbury, Ontario. The project shows a 21% IRR at $8.50 nickel, and the nickel price is currently over $11 per pound.
The company has a large land position, and with a fully permitted mill, we believe it will have many other opportunities in what is one of the world's best nickel belts in the world. Ausgold. Ausgold is developing the Katanning Gold Project in Western Australia. They report a gold resource of around 2 million ozt of gold. When we invested in the company, it had a much smaller resource and had done a scoping study too early in the process. As a result, investors were disappointed in their prospects. Our team focused on the geology and their excellent geological team, and we made the investment.
They are now doing a pre-feasibility study, which we would hope will show a project that can produce 100,000 ozt of gold per year, which should be well-received by the market. Saturn Metals. We own around 16.7% of Saturn Metals. Saturn owns a large land position called the Apollo Hill Project in Western Australia. They have drilled off a deposit that is amenable to heap leach processing, which is a very low-cost way of recovering gold. They have outlined a low-grade deposit that contains over 1.5 million ozt of gold. The opportunity here is that the Australian stock market has not had a lot of exposure to heap leach projects and struggles to value them.
In Nevada, a deposit of this scale and grade would have a significantly higher valuation. As they continue their work, we expect this company's stock price to re-rate upwards. Maritime Resources. We own 19.96% of Maritime Resources. Maritime Resources is developing the Hammerdown Gold Mine in Newfoundland. Maritime Resources is a special situation because there is already a mill that they own 140 km away that can treat their ore, so the capital cost will be low. In addition, the project is very high grade and they plan to use ore sorting to upgrade the value of the rock and reduce the trucking cost.
We believe that their initial mine life will be a relatively short life of around five years, but their exploration potential is significant and would expect the mine to last much longer. Viva Gold. We own 19.9% of Viva Gold. Viva Gold owns a heap leach development project in Nevada. The project has a resource of around 600,000 ozt of gold, but still needs much drilling to pull it all together. What attracts us to Viva is an experienced management team and a very high-grade core to the deposit, which would act as a starter pit. As the resources pull together, we envisage attractive economics as the starter pit will enhance the economics with a very quick payback.
This company has around a CAD 9 million market cap and almost CAD 4 million in cash. Some of our non-mining assets include TauRx. TauRx is developing a drug for slowing down the progress of dementia. We own around 3.5% of the company. They have just completed a phase III clinical trial and announced on May 31, 2022, that they received encouraging preliminary LUCIDITY data. The study was called LUCIDITY, showing participants receiving HMTM decline at a rate substantially less than is typical in Alzheimer's based on public research. The company is excited by the results, but will not be in a position for at least the next several months to report more on the data.
In addition, they have reported that the safety profile appears favorable and consistent with previous HMTM study. The company is now pursuing regulatory submission. Android Industries. We own 20% of Android Industries. Android Industries is an industrial leader in automobile assembly and a global supply chain management. Despite an extremely challenging environment for automobile production volumes, the company has done a very good job of managing the things within its control. The company continues to win contracts with improving IRRs and has a great deal of visibility into its growth pipeline, despite near-term challenges. A new normal of automobile inventories will be required, and a restocking will benefit the company in future years.
In summary, we have a very compelling valuation, trading at a large discount to our NAV, which we believe has significant upside. We have made considerable progress transforming ourselves into an active investor focused on the mining industry, and we are continuing to focus on our four key strategic initiatives, namely rationalizing our portfolio of private non-mining businesses, streamlining our capital structure and reducing cash G&A, investing in more private equity style mining deals, and obtaining direct access to cash flows by acquiring direct ownership interest in mining operations. Before opening it up to questions, I'd like to thank all of the team at Dundee Corporation.
The last few years have been difficult. With a pandemic, a war in Europe, renewed inflation, a major office move, and over two years of not being in the office, our team, which is much smaller today than before the pandemic, has shined. Thank you. This concludes my presentation. We will now take a few minutes to answer any questions. Participants are reminded, when asking a question, please follow the instructions in the virtual platform, which will ask you to indicate your name, which entity you represent, if any, and confirm whether you're a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxy voter. Pause a minute.
As we have no questions, to close, I would like to thank our shareholders, partners, and our board for their continued support and confidence in our team. Have a great evening. Operator?
Thank you. This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect and have a pleasant day.