News

March 28, 2008

Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Freezer For Avalon Minerals’ David McSweeney

By Our Man in Oz

Out of the frying pan into the freezer. That’s one way of looking at the change in store for David McSweeney, the Australian lawyer who once explored the scorching Australian outback but is now heading for the frozen north of Sweden. Best known as the man behind Gindalbie Metals when it was a gold producer and later an iron ore hopeful, McSweeney has been slowly making his return via a new corporate vehicle, Avalon Minerals. The original plan for Avalon was to focus on the Empress Springs gold project near Croydon in north Queensland, but the new preference is to get down to work on the historic Viscaria and Adak copper mines in the Norrbottens area of Sweden.

The latest plan, which has yet to generate any real excitement among investors, is to re-develop old copper mines once worked by two of Scandinavia’s best-known mining companies, Outokumpu and Lundin, as well as by the Swedish government. Viscaria, the best of these assets, was acquired in 2003, although never re-opened, by Phelps Dodge, now a division of the American copper giant, Freeport McMoran. In theory, both Viscaria and the Adak mine contain substantial amounts of ore, and with the...