News

February 20, 2008

Horizonte Courts The Majors With Gold, Nickel, Silver And Zinc

By Alastair Ford

According to Jeremy Martin, chief executive of Horizonte Minerals, a lot of the current crop of deals in the resources sector are simply about moving reserves and resources from one company into another. He doesn’t name names, but there are plenty of offenders, as we all know. Horizonte, by contrast, makes a virtue of adding value by adding ounces, and rather than bumping them around from company to company likes to sign up majors to take new discoveries forward - and, with any luck, into development. Horizonte’s exploration and license acquisition programmes in Brazil and Peru are specifically tailored to this, as Mr Martin explains: “We aim to control districts. Our end market is the majors, and they like to control districts”. Management, he adds, have good contact with the majors: non-executive chairman David Hall has pulled Teck Cominco into deals with other companies that acts for, notably Stratex, while chief operating officer Nick Winer ran the exploration side of AngloGold’s Brazil operations and before that did the same for BHP. As if to ram the point home still further, the company’s press releases and website repeatedly state that Horizonte “aims to become the preferred exploration partner for major gold and base metal mining companies in the region”.

So far Horizonte only has joint venture partner on board with an advanced project: Troy Resources has just signed up to spend US$2 million on the company’s Tanagra gold property in Brazil’s Carajas province. Horizonte has to date focussed on Carajas, where without doubt it’s operating in big country, and in the neighbourhoods of some of the biggest boys in the business. Carajas is where Vale has all its major iron ore projects, and, just down the road from Horizonte’s Lontra nickel laterite...