PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior Explaurum will raise up to A$4.5-million through a share placement to fund work at its Tampia gold project, in Western Australia.

The company on Monday announced that it had completed a bookbuild to place up to 42.9-million shares, at 10.5c each, to a number of sophisticated and institutional investors.

“We are pleased to have successfully completed this heavily oversubscribed placement to enable the rapid progress at the Tampia gold project to continue. The placement was very well supported by our existing shareholders and new institutional and sophisticated investors,” said Explaurum MD and CEO John Lawton.

The funds raised will be used to deliver an updated Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource for the Tampia gold project, as well as to conduct extensive regional exploration.

The funds would also be used to update a scoping study at the Tampia project, which was due to be delivered in the third quarter of this year, and to fund a feasibility study due in the second half of the year.

“Explaurum is on the cusp of completing a major resource drilling programme at Tampia, and we are on target to deliver an updated resource in late August which will be the basis of the recently commenced feasibility study due for completion at the end of 2017,” said Lawton.

“During this process, we plan to update the 2016 scoping study in September to provide shareholders and investors with an indication of the project’s potential viability as a standalone operation.

“In addition, there is exciting regional potential based on a 400 km² airborne gravity programme completed earlier this year. This programme discovered three major and 21 other exploration targets with similar geophysical characteristics to the known Tampia deposit, although the three major targets are considerably larger than Tampia.”

An assessment of these projects will start immediately and will proceed in parallel with the feasibility study.