News

April 15, 2008

Cangold Gets To Work With The Drill-bit Down Mexico Way

By Alastair Ford

Robert Archer, chief executive of Cangold, certainly likes Mexico. Cangold isn’t the only business he has running down there in tequila country. Great Panther is also coming along in leaps and bounds. But, like two sisters, the companies are similar but with different tastes. Great Panther prefers silver, while Cangold prefers gold. Mexico is primarily known for its silver. Within the last week or so the world’s largest silver producer, Fresnillo, currently 100 per cent owned by the private Mexican conglomerate Penoles, made a splash in London when it announced a listing, which, with a projected £4-5 billion market capitalization, would take it straight into the FTSE100. Fresnillo may be the world’s number one in silver, but it also has two gold mines, which between them produced 280,000 ounces of gold last year. So although Mexico is predominant in silver, it’s not wholly silver-oriented, as Bob Archer appreciated when he was originally getting his ducks in a row and putting together Great Panther and Cangold.

Cangold was originally set up with some Canadian assets inside it, but the Thorn property in British Columbia has just been sold, and the Argosy mine in Ontario may follow it out of the company if a reasonable deal gets put on the table. The real problem, according to Mr Archer, was that working up there was seasonal. Faced with a similar issue and outlook, Lori Walton at Firestone Ventures, also looked south, although in her case, to Guatemala. With Cangold, Mexico was the obvious choice. “We...