PERTH (miningweekly.com) – ASX-listed Kimberley Diamonds has enlarged its gold portfolio by acquiring a 830 000 oz gold project in Spain.
The company, which also owns the Lerala diamond mine in Botswana, on Friday announced that it had been awarded the rights to a package of tenements covering the Lomero-Poyatos sulphide deposit, in Spain’s premier mining district.
The project area is estimated to host an inferred resource of some 6.07-million tonnes, grading 3.25 g/t gold and 88.74 g/t silver.
Besides the newly acquired tenements, Kimberley also owns a number of copper/gold exploration tenements, which the company believed had not received full market value in recent times. As such, Kimberley had been seeking a flagship copper/gold project to complement these assets, with the intent to spin out the combined portfolio of nondiamond projects into a new entity.
Kimberley was hoping to spend some €400 000 over the next year on exploration and a further €5-million over the following two years on the Spanish asset. The first year of spending would be funded from operational cash flows, while funding would likely be raised for the second and third year of exploration by spinning off the company’s copper/gold assets.
Kimberley would not be required to pay any up-front consideration for the Spanish tenements, but was required to spend cash on exploration.