News

July 22, 2008

Balkans Gold Has Some Good Reasons For Its Apparently Eccentric Leap Into West Africa

By Charles Wyatt

At first sight a company called Balkans Gold announcing the acquisition of a company with assets in Burkina Faso and Niger looks like a U-turn as complete as those being made by the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. A word with Noel Taylor, managing director of the company, puts a completely different slant on the matter. Noel is a Brit who has been involved in the mining industry for the best part of 30 years, arriving in Australia via South Africa in 1988. He started with Mount Isa Mines as senior geologist at the Hilton mine and most recently managed the gold exploration portfolio of Yilgarn Gold. Then Balkans Gold acquired a portfolio of projects in Bulgaria from a Canadian listed company called Euromax Resources early in 2006 and listed on the ASX later that year with Noel at the helm.

Since then Balkans Gold has been carrying out successful exploration programmes on three projects, and has reached the point where production could be fast-tracked at Breznik, which is only around 130 kilometres from suitable toll milling operations which are looking for work. The Rakitovo project, which is in the Rhodope Mountains, only 115 kilometres south southeast of Sofia, is not too far behind. In the best of all worlds a quick decision could be made for Breznik to go ahead: an initial...