News

March 10, 2009

Patagonia Gold Should Be In Production By The End Of The Year, Helped Nicely Along By Nearly £10 Million In New Money

By Alastair Ford

“Patagonia is back on track”, says Richard Prickett. That’s the simple, short version of the latest installment in the story of Patagonia Gold, a company which - in fairly good company, it has to be said - was unceremoniously dumped out of Argentina’s Chubut province some years ago as the politics turned distinctly anti-mining. That forced departure was a hammer blow to Patagonia at the time, no doubt about it, but anyone looking for a positive spin on the upheavals of the past need look no further than the recent announcements that Patagonia has put out.

Following the exodus from Chubut, the company managed to move root and branch to the Santa Cruz province to the south, where it picked up a tidy looking portfolio of assets from Barrick in 2007. It’s taken a little while to pull these together into a coherent offering, but following a £9.3 million fundraising organized by Matrix, the details of which were announced at the beginning of this month, the situation now looks very clear: Patagonia will move into a trial production phase by the end of...