Mozambique Mineral Resources Ministry Permanent Secretary Alfredo Nampete has given the assurance that the country’s government was in the final stages of drawing up the ordinances for the Mineral and Petroleum Laws. Speaking in the last week of November in the country’s capital, Maputo, he stated that the process would soon be finished.

“Following the approval of these laws and the fiscal regimes by the Assembly of the Republic [Parliament], in August and September of this year, we are now completing the formulation of the respective ordinances, which should be ready by the end of the current year,” he affirmed. The ordinances, he assured, were being drawn up in line with the mining and petroleum companies and with civil society. The ordinances would detail the rules and regulations that will have to be followed by mining and petroleum companies operating in the country.

Meanwhile, British company Gemfields, listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM, which specialises in coloured gemstones and produces amethysts and emeralds in Zambia and rubies in Mozambique, revealed it had unearthed a 40.23-ct ruby at its 75%-owned Montepuez mine, in the Cabo Delgado province, which is the country’s northern-most province. The company described the ruby as “exceptional” and as “one of the most important rubies unearthed in recent times”. The first auction of rough rubies and corundum from Montepuez, which took place in June, brought Gemfields $33.5-million. The company’s second ruby auction will take place in Singapore this month.

Separately, another London Stock Exchange AIM-listed mining company, Savannah Resources, recently raised some £1.3-million from the placing of 29 483 704 new ordinary shares (at a price of £0.0445, or 4.45 pence, per share) with existing and new shareholders. This means that the company now has £2.3-million in cash, which will be used to push forward its Jangamo heavy mineral sands project, in Mozambique, and its copper projects in Oman, as well as for general working capital.

“[T]he placing provides us with a very comfortable level of cash and current assets that will be applied to accelerating the tempo of exploration and evaluation of our copper projects in Oman and to advancing our highly prospective Jangamo heavy mineral sands project, in Mozambique,” stated CEO David Archer. “Our major near term objectives are to firstly announce a JORC [Joint Ore Reserves Committee] Mineral Resource Estimate for our Jangamo project late in December, followed by ground geophysics and drilling on [Oman copper concession] Block 5 and the flying of a VTEM [Versatile Time domain ElectroMagnetic] survey over [Oman] Block 4 to further prove the prospectivity of these highly exciting copper projects.”

The Jangamo project is the property of Mozambican company Matilda Minerals Limitada, which is itself 80%-owned by Savannah Resources. The project is located in the southern coastal province of Inhambane, which lies north-east of Maputo. The Jangamo concession, in the district of the same name, is about 350 km from the capital city and close to the port city and provincial capital, also named Inhambane. It is also immediately adjacent to, and on the western side of, Rio Tinto’s Mutamba deposit.

The Jangamo concession covers 180 km2 and the company has, since October last year, drilled some 8 000 m and identified five mineralised zones. These have the potential for higher grade heavy mineral sands (HMS) with the mineralisation varying in strike length from 2 km to 15 km. “Notably, much of the higher grade HMS mineralisation commences from the surface and the mineralisation appears to contain low levels of deleterious elements, such as chromium, uranium and thorium contaminants, positively impacting the economics of the project, as any potential mining operation would have a very low strip ratio,” says the company on its website.