Syndicated Metals Limited is pleased to advise that it has advanced on a number of fronts, the Barbara Copper-Gold Project, located within its Northern Project Hub, 50km east of Mt Isa in north-east Queensland.

Metallurgy

In November 2012, Syndicated commenced a second batch of testwork to determine the metallurgical performance of the Barbara ores across the expected range of production grades and directly from the ore zones which make up the Mineral Resource estimate of 5.3 million tonnes at 1.4% Cu and 0.2ppm Au. A total of 492 samples were collected across the strike and depth extent of the orebody. Samples have been categorised by domain and composite samples of each domain made from weighting of individual samples by intersection length. All samples are of sulphide ore and were chosen according to the availability of core samples.

The samples collected cover both material that is expected to fall within an open pit development and deeper potential underground mining positions. They also cover both the Syndicated 100% owned and West Leichardt Joint Venture (WLJV) owned portion of the Mineral Resource. Testwork consisted of standard grinding, flotation and reagent addition tests. Results of Rougher flotation tests which have been received to date are presented below. These tests cover a wider range of copper head grades than the previous sighter tests, and represent metal grades which are significantly closer to the expected production grade.

Samples showed very fast flotation kinetics for copper with between 98.4% and 99.4% recovery of copper within the first seven minutes of flotation. Rejection of gangue was exceptionally good. Gold recovery of between 39% and 65% and cobalt recovery of between 28% and 52% was also achieved. Arsenic grade in Rougher concentrates was acceptable with results from the Hangingwall Domain samples lying outside the upper limit of 2000ppm, which confirmed the previous sighter test results.

In general, the results are highly encouraging and demonstrate that copper recovery of 98% can be achieved at significantly lower head grade than the initial sighter tests. Rejection of gangue to tailing at the Rougher flotation stage is uniformly high. Mass recoveries correlate well with the copper head grade resulting in very good copper selectivity and high copper concentrate grade during flotation. Cleaner concentrate testwork is now proceeding with the aim of determining final Mass% and Copper% recovery while achieving 25% copper in concentrate grade. Arsenic rejection testwork will also be undertaken at the Cleaner flotation stage.

Previously, two metallurgical samples from the Barbara Project were sent for sighter tests to Amdel Laboratories. The samples gave encouraging initial results. However, the samples were selected from relatively high copper and sulphide rich ores and may not have been representative of the Mineral Resource which was subsequently defined at Barbara. These March 2009 sighter tests resulted in very high mass recoveries to concentrate and copper recoveries of between 98% and 99% to Rougher Concentrate within the first three minutes of flotation, indicating very rapid flotation kinetics for the samples provided.

In addition, Cleaner Concentrate tests showed that overall recoveries of 94-96% copper could be achieved while maintaining a copper concentrate grade of approximately 25% Cu – which is the generally accepted industry standard. One of the Cleaner Concentrate samples (Sample 1) showed elevated arsenic grades, which is generally considered by smelters to be a deleterious element in copper concentrate when arsenic grade exceeds 2000ppm.