News

January 22, 2008

Landore Resources Has A Nickel Mine In The Making

Once upon a time, not too long ago, mining was about as fashionable in London as an engineer at a geology convention, and gold languished at a mere US$265 an ounce. In these fabled times anyone who wanted to raise money to dig up metal either had to sell his soul to Bruce Rowan or to re-brand, with a temporary sleight of hand, as a dot-com. But one mining company shone out in the gloom of these dark times with a 3 million ounce gold project in Argentina, and showed that, contrary to reports of the industry’s early demise, small mining was not dead.

The two executives in charge were Bill Humphries and Richard Prickett, the project was the Esquel gold property in Argentina, and the company’s name was Brancote. Brancote acquired Esquel when its share price was a humble 10p. When the company finally sold out to Meridian Gold in 2002, the all-paper offer came in at 178p per share. It was one of AIM’s first major success stories, bought and sold before the current mining boom was even a twinkle in the Chinese economy’s eye.

But there is an...