Welcome to Mining Weekly. In this podcast, read by Irma Venter of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, we bring you the past week’s top news stories from the mining industry in South Africa and the rest of the world.

In this week’s bulletin:
- DRDGold heads back to South Africa ,
- An end in sight to the Randgold and Exploration – JCI saga, and
- De Beers sells its Kimberley underground operations .

HOMECOMING

Refocused gold producer DRDGold plans to sell its seventy eight point five percent stake in Australasian subsidiary Emperor Mines “as soon as possible”, and will embark on a road show to this end after it has released a prospectus for the sale.

It would then be solely centred on South Africa, after a more-than-three-year stint in Papua New Guinea.

ASX-listed Emperor announced this week that it plans to merge with Canadian gold junior Intrepid Mines, on condition that DRDGold first exited the troubled company.

Emperor is already trying to sell its last remaining mine, Tolukuma, along with its associated exploration tenements, which would leave it with an Indonesian exploration joint venture as its sole minerals asset.

GOLD MERGER

Mining firms Randgold & Exploration and JCI could merge before the end of the year, finally laying to rest a drawn-out dispute.

A circular is under construction, which will be submitted to the Securities Regulation Panel, which will decide if it was suitable for shareholder distribution, in the next ten days to two weeks.

In July, the two firms requested that the SRP allow them to exclude audited financial statements from their merger application.

The firms argue that it would be a momentous task to prepare audited statements after massive fraud muddied their finances when the late Brett Kebble served as CEO of both R&E and JCI.

DIAMOND DEAL

Junior miner Petra Diamonds, which has bought the Kimberley underground operations from De Beers, the largest diamond miner, for seventy eight point five million rand, aims to have the mine back in production in the next six to twelve months.

The historic operation has been closed since 2005, after its large cost structure made it unprofitable for De Beers to carry on operating the mine.

But De Beers group chairperson Nicky Oppenheimer said that Petra’s cost structure would allow it to better operate the Kimberley underground mine.

Petra, which also bought the Koffiefontein mine from De Beers last year, is hoping to produce some one hundred and twenty thousand carats a year from the Kimberley underground operation by 2008.

The Koffiefontein mine, which has already been reopened, will produce in the order of one hundred thousand carats a year, taking Petra’s yearly diamond production to about three hundred thousand carats a year.

Print:
Also, in this week’s Mining Weekly magazine, published on Friday, read our cover story on Rio Tinto’s chief executive’s plans to reposition the company on the African continent.

We also report on large amounts of precious minerals being smuggled out of Zimbabwe.

Finally, don’t miss our feature on quarrying.

That’s a round up of this week’s stories on Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly. For more on these and other stories, visit miningweekly.com