Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Vista Gold’s 2018 Financial Results and Corporate Update Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, today is Wednesday, February 27, 2019. It is now my pleasure to introduce Vista’s President and CEO and your host, Mr. Fred Earnest. Please go ahead, Mr. Earnest.

Thank you, Kenzie. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining Vista Gold Corp.’s 2018 financial results and 2019 corporate update conference call. I’m pleased to be joined on this call by Jack Engele, our Senior Vice President and CFO. In the course of this call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Vista to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. Please refer to our Form 10-K for a detailed discussion of risks and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our forward-looking statements. 2018 was a year of tremendous achievement for the Mt Todd Gold Project and as we look forward to 2019 we expect improvements of similar magnitude. Briefly, in 2018 we announced the results of technical and economic studies demonstrating lower capital and operating costs significantly higher recoveries and improved margins for the Mt Todd Gold Project. We also announced the authorization of our last major environmental permit for the project. We commenced the additional process area optimization test work, which has demonstrated another significant improvement in gold recovery for the project. That work is expected to be completed in the coming months and result in an updated technical report. We expect the combination of potentially lower foreign exchange rates, higher gold price, and improved gold recovery to have a very noticeable positive impact on the updated project economics. We believe that these results will improve the leverage to gold price that has allowed our share price to significantly outperform our peers since mid-November when the gold price began its course of steady improvement. I will discuss these topics in greater detail later in the call, but I will now turn the time over to Jack Engele.

Thank you Fred. Good afternoon everyone. I will start with our balance sheet for December 31, 2018. Our working capital totaled about $13.2 million on December 31, which included cash and T-Bills of about $8.1 million. The Company continues to be debt-free. Turning to our statement of income and loss for the year ended December 31, we reported a net loss of $8.7 million or $0.09 a share for the year. The principal components of this loss are $10.8 million of operating expenses, a $1.7 million mark-to-market gain on our investment in Midas Gold Corp., and about $0.4 million of interest and other income. The main components of the $10.8 million of operating expenses include $2.9 million of fixed site management cash costs in Mt Todd, about $3.7 million of fixed corporate GNA costs, about $1.2 million of cash discretionary programs at Mt Todd, a $1 million non-cash impairment charge related to our used mill equipment and about $2 million in non-cash, stock based compensation and depreciation. Our 2018 fixed costs at Mt Todd, we're about 10% higher than 2017 fixed costs. In 2018 we began baseline monitoring to comply with the terms of our EPBC permit, which we received in January, 2018. Discretionary programs at Mt Todd are lower in 2018 than in 2017 as several large programs, ore sorting studies, met testing, and the PFS update were completed through the course of 2017. 2018 corporate administration costs tended about 15% higher in 2018 than in 2017 mainly attributed to an increased focus on investor relations programs in 2018. Looking ahead at Mt Todd we expect 2019 fixed costs to be very consistent with the 2018 level spending. We also expect fewer and comparatively smaller discretionary programs in 2019. We expect 2019 G&A costs to trend about 5% to 10% lower than our 2018 costs. We continue to believe that our existing working capital together with potential future sources of non-dilutive financing will be sufficient to fully fund our currently planned fixed costs and discretionary programs into 2020. Potential sources of non-dilutive financing include the future option payments for the Guadalupe de los Reyes project in Mexico to $1.5 million option payments are due in 2019. Depending on market conditions, the sale of some or all of our Midas Gold Shares and the sale of our used mill equipment. A.M. King Industries continues to market the mill equipment for us and we've had several credible expressions of interest over the past year. That concludes my comments. Fred?

Thank you, Jack. I’ll first briefly address the achievements of 2018 and then provide an outlook for the project optimization programs that are set to wind up in the first half of the year. I will start with an update of our permitting activities. In 2014, we received the approval of the environmental impact statement for the Mt Todd gold project. EIS was reviewed and approved by the Northern Territory Environmental Protection Agency. Soon after receiving this approval, the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Energy advised us that upon reviewing the approved EIS, it concluded that the Mt Todd project would be required to seek an additional approval under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999. Our initial request for authorization required by this act was made in December of 2015. And following review by the agency, we spent much of the succeeding 18 months responding to requests for additional information. Subsequently, we worked closely with the local stakeholders, NT agency officials and academics who support, demonstrated commitment and innovation helped us to achieve our common goals. And in January of 2018, we received the authorization required by the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. As required by this authorization, we have prepared detailed monitoring and mitigation plans and in some cases have already begun implementation of these plans. The EIS and the authorization required by the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act constitute the two major environmental permits required for the development of the Mt Todd project. Secondly, after months of review of a preliminary document, we received formal notification from the Northern Territory Department of Mines last October that they were satisfied with the rigor of our Mine Management Plan or MMP, the equivalent of a mine operating permit in North America. With this notification, we…

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from Heiko Ihle from H.C. Wainwright. Your line is open.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my question.

Good afternoon. Heiko. Thank you.

Hey. Did you complete the remaining fine grinding and leach tests that you spoke about in early January? I mean, there was a sentence in the earnings release that the test has been used to confirm the Company’s extirpation of gold recoveries above 90% over a broad range of ore head grades. Is there any updates you can give us or a timeline that we should be expecting to see something? Because I think you said that it was going to come out in the first quarter.

Yes. Heiko, the high pressure grinding role and ore sorting tests were completed in October and we received the assays is late in the year, announced those results in January. The multiple samples for the test work that we've discussed which will be the fine grinding at both FLSmidth and Core Metallurgy have been prepared and shift the labs. We're now waiting for the start of those grinding test and they will subsequently be followed by leaching tests. We in January projected that that test work would be completed by the end of the first quarter. We're still hopeful that that will be the case. I don't know that we will have the asset results back and be able to announce results by the end of the quarter, but sometime around the end of this quarter, first part of Q2, we will have that work completed.

Okay. And then this only really only 4 weeks, 4.5 weeks away. So it's not a whole lot of time, which was good. And you guys always pretty efficient when it comes to that stuff. And just to follow up, really in January, you also announced the schedule pretty updated PFS, sort of along that last question, is that at that timeline is still on track?

Provided that the samples get processed by FLSmidth and Core Metallurgy that's the uncertainty right now, but provided that those samples are ground in a timely manner, then we will still be on schedule to update the PFS and publish those results, the latter part of Q2 targeting somewhere toward the end of May.

Okay. So is it fair to say that there is probably about a six week to eight week gap between the results of the PFS?

From the time that we announced the grinding leaching tests results to the time of announcing the PFS results. I think that six weeks to eight weeks is a reasonable time.

Excellent. Thank you guys. Keep it on.

Thanks, Heiko.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I’ll turn the call back to our presenters.

Very good. Thank you Kenzie. Again, thank you ladies and gentlemen for taking time to be on the call this afternoon. As we've indicated, 2018 was a very exciting year for us and the work that's in progress right now we think has the potential to result in significant, similar improvements to the Mt Todd gold project. As indicated in the response to Heiko’s questions, we're working to finalize that those testing programs and to be able to announce results and we encourage you to stay tuned and to be attentive to those results when they're announced. We appreciate everybody's time on the call this afternoon. And with that, we wish you all a very pleasant and very good afternoon.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.