Bolivia's Top Court Restores Silver Elephant's Contract, and the Shares Doubled

A courtroom in Sucre has handed a Vancouver miner back the ground it fought over for almost two years. Silver Elephant Mining Corp. (TSX: ELEF) said in a release at 10:04 ET on November 6, 2026 that Bolivia's Supreme Tribunal of Justice had ruled for its subsidiary, Apogee Minerals Bolivia S.A., in the case over the Pulacayo-Paca silver project.

The court annulled a board resolution of December 16, 2024 in which COMIBOL, Bolivia's state mining corporation, had cancelled the Pulacayo-Paca Mining Production Contract. It also set aside the administrative proceedings that COMIBOL and the Ministry of Mining and Metallurgy had brought against Apogee over that contract. Apogee filed for judicial review on October 31, 2025 and was formally notified of the decision on November 5, 2026, according to the release.

The market reacted fast. CIRO, the regulator that oversees trading on Canadian exchanges, halted the shares at 9:22 ET pending news and let them trade again at 10:45 ET. By the close the stock had more than doubled.

It finished at C$0.265, up 120.83 per cent on the day, per end-of-day data read after the close on November 6, 2026 from TMX Money.

What Silver Elephant owns in Bolivia

Pulacayo-Paca is the company's main project. The audited statements for the year to March 31, 2026 describe it as eight mining areas in southwestern Bolivia. One of them, Apuradita, covers 750 hectares and is held directly through a separate mining administrative contract. The other seven cover 2,803 hectares and sit under the production contract with COMIBOL dated October 3, 2019.

A mining production contract, in Bolivia, is the agreement through which the state lets a private company work ground that the state corporation controls. This one gives Apogee the exclusive right to develop and mine those seven areas for up to 30 years, the release says.

The ground has a long drilling history: 96,021 metres by three operators between 1994 and 2022, the release says.

It also carries a mineral resource estimate by Mercator Geological Services with an effective date of October 13, 2020. That estimate gives 106.7 million ounces of silver in the indicated category and 13.1 million ounces in the inferred category, across the Pulacayo and Paca deposits, with lead and zinc alongside.

Two words in that sentence matter. An indicated resource is a tonnage and grade estimated with enough drilling to plan around; an inferred one rests on wider spacing and is less certain. Neither is a reserve, which is the part of a resource shown to be mineable at a profit by a feasibility-level study. The release says so directly: the resources are not reserves and have no demonstrated economic viability. Its silver-equivalent figures assume US$17 an ounce for silver, US$0.95 a pound for lead and US$1.16 a pound for zinc, the 2020 assumptions, which the release has not updated. It also says the 2020 figures predate mining at Paca and have not been adjusted for what was taken out since.

The company did mine there. Between October 2023 and November 2024 the company mined 261,530 wet tonnes of oxide material grading 183 grams of silver per tonne from Paca by open pit, according to the release. The cancellation came a month after that work stopped.

Why the court's word carries so much weight here

For a company of this size, the contract is close to the whole story. The statement of financial position at March 31, 2026 carries exploration and evaluation assets of C$21,805,967, out of total assets of C$22,535,811. Pulacayo-Paca is what the company is focused on, in the statements' own words. Silver traded at US$51.99 an ounce at 7:15 ET on November 6, 2026, per Fortune's daily silver price report.

The cancellation hung over that number. The auditor's report, dated June 26, 2026, listed Pulacayo-Paca as a key audit matter because the state entity's resolution had "resulted in significant uncertainty regarding the Company's legal rights to the underlying E&E assets." In note 6, management set out its own position: two temporary work permits issued by COMIBOL in December 2019 and November 2020 authorized operations while approval of the contract was pending, the second with no stated expiry, and the company said it had operated in compliance with them.

The court's reasons, as the release reports them, line up with that argument. It found that COMIBOL had not properly considered the approvals, permits and authorizations it had itself issued to Apogee, and that the contract had been terminated without legal basis or proper procedure.

The Apuradita area was never part of the dispute. Note 6 says the cancellation did not affect it, and the company has kept working there.

An August 21, 2026 release reported three batches of Apuradita concentrate sold in 2026, 84.7 dry tonnes carrying 24,538 ounces of silver, for about US$1.4 million in cash proceeds, with the final settlement on the third batch still to come.

The money behind the project

The balance sheet is small next to the asset. Cash was C$324,948 at March 31, 2026, per the audited statements. Bills due within a year were larger, and the working capital deficiency at March 31, 2026 was C$2,205,847. The unaudited interim statements for the three months to June 30, 2026, filed on SEDAR+ on August 12, 2026, show cash of C$603,513 and a working capital deficiency of C$1,093,617 at June 30, 2026; the October financing and spending since June 30 are not in those figures. Management's answer to the shortfall, in the same note, is that it "continues to assess financing and strategic alternatives to support ongoing operations."

Note 1 of the statements says the company's ability to continue "is dependent upon its ability to raise additional debt or equity" and that these "material uncertainties may cast significant doubt upon the Company's ability to continue as a going concern." The auditor drew attention to the same note.

The year itself showed a profit of C$22,731,706, and one source more than accounted for it: the reversal of a Mongolian tax assessment on the old Ulaan Ovoo coal project, worth C$20,874,433 plus C$5,196,187 of interest. Against those items, general and administrative costs ran at C$2,877,851 for the year.

The company has raised money in small steps since. On October 13, 2026 it closed the first tranche of a private placement, 7,000,000 units at C$0.12 each, raising C$840,000 on that date, mainly for working capital. Each unit carries a warrant to buy another share at C$0.16 for three years, and chief executive and chairman John Lee took 1,500,000 of the units, the October 13 release says.

As of November 6, 2026, the company's releases on Newsfile for the past three months and CIRO's notices showed no paid research or awareness programme and no regulatory action on the shares beyond the morning's halt pending news and the resumption that followed.

How many shares are out there now

The share count is where the day's price turns into a company value, so it helps to build it from the documents.

That total leaves out any warrant or option exercises since March and any later tranche of the placement, so it is a floor built from four documents. At the C$0.265 close it works out to about C$18.7 million of market value. TMX Money's quote page showed 71,128,929 shares in total on the same afternoon, a cross-check that sits close to the documents' sum.

Every placement warrant exercised at C$0.16 would add a share. The October 13 closing alone carries 7,106,750 of them, counting the finders' warrants. The audited statements also show 22,202,097 warrants outstanding at a weighted average exercise price of C$0.281 and 4,657,000 stock options at a weighted average of C$0.39 at March 31, 2026.

A second project, a shared chief executive

The shares on the last row of that table went to CleanTech Vanadium Mining Corp., which is selling Silver Elephant the Robinson-Lasher zinc-germanium-gallium project in Kentucky. The October 26 release says the TSX and the TSX Venture Exchange approved the deal and the shares were issued on October 23 at a deemed C$0.13. It has not closed. Title passes only after CleanTech exercises its own option on the ground and Silver Elephant meets its closing conditions. Those include US$1,255,000 in cash instalments to September 1, 2029.

Silver Elephant also has to commit at least US$2,000,000 to exploration there and prepare an independent NI 43-101 technical report, the release says; it gives no date for the spending.

John Lee is chief executive and a director of both Silver Elephant and CleanTech, and note 25 (subsequent events) of the March 31, 2026 statements says he will abstain from board voting on the transaction. The October 26 release lists among its risk factors the risks of the transaction being a non-arm's length transaction.

What the release leaves open

The release reports the ruling and the court's reasons. It does not say whether the decision can be appealed, and it gives no plan or date for returning to work on the seven contract areas. The release carries no quote from management. Its forward-looking section assumes the ruling "will be fully recognized, respected, and implemented by COMIBOL," and lists incomplete implementation and political or regulatory change in Bolivia among the risks.

There is also the step that came before the cancellation. Note 6 of the March statements says the contract grants its rights "once approved by the Plurinational Legislative Assembly," Bolivia's legislature, and that approval had not been received at March 31, 2026. The court restored the contract to where it stood before December 2024. Where it stood was waiting for that vote.

My own view is short. This is the best legal news the company could have had on its main asset, and it puts Silver Elephant back where it was two years ago, holding a contract that Bolivia's legislature has still to approve.

The release puts no date on what happens next. The company's next steps on Pulacayo-Paca are COMIBOL's response to the ruling and a vote by the Plurinational Legislative Assembly on the contract.