News

April 22, 2009

Plenty Of Directors Of Junior Mining Companies Would Give Their Eye Teeth To Be In The Same Position As International Barytex At The Moment

By Charles Wyatt

Deals with the Chinese tend to take time, as Alf Hills, chief executive of Canadian listed International Barytex has discovered. He agreed to sell 100 per cent owned East China Capital Holdings to a Chinese company with the very appropriate name of Touch Lucky back in November; shareholders approved the deal in December; in January Touch Lucky confirmed that it had finished its due diligence and was ready to commit to the purchase, but at a revised price due to the turmoil in financial markets; and at the end of March International Barytex said that it had completed all its obligations in relation to the sale, so it is all go. In point of fact International Barytex only owns 60 per cent of ECCH, but the minority shareholders have agreed to the deal so they are acting as a single party.

The attraction to the Chinese is the 75 per cent stake held in the Shituru copper project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This project has already undergone a positive feasibility study which was announced last September. It proposed the development of an open pit with an ore processing and electro-winning facility capable of producing 38,000 tonnes/year of LME grade cathode copper. The project scope was largely unchanged from the preliminary assessment disclosed in January 2008 with the...