News

June 10, 2009

Profits Continue To Roll In From Pan African's Barberton Gold Mines, And Now There’s Platinum Production On The Way Too

By Alastair Ford

Jan Nelson is in a fairly upbeat mood as he picks up the phone when Minesite calls for a friendly chat. One might not necessarily have expected such a positive demeanour from a man who’s just had to put the brakes on at a gold development project in Mozambique, but these days Pan African, the company Jan heads up as chief executive, has more strings to its bow simply than the now delayed Manica project. To be specific, it’s now the owner and operator of the Barberton Mines in South Africa. True, at one stage the only asset that looked as though it offered any real potential within Pan African was Manica, but that was before the company got together with its larger partner and major shareholder Metorex, and took over the running at Barberton. So Pan African is now a 100,000 ounce producer, and a delay at Manica, while it might be enough to spoil the chief executive’s breakfast, doesn’t seem to have spoiled his whole day.

In a nutshell the problem was that Manica, as yet, hasn’t delivered up quite enough gold to warrant a development decision. But with 2.57 million ounces at the last count, there’s enough there to warrant further work, which is why the statement that Pan African issued on the 4th June merely stated that it was focused on an effort “to consolidate additional resources in the area”, rather than announcing the specific cancellation of any work. The headline from broker Ambrian also gave a fairly...