News

February 03, 2010

Serabi Mining Sets Itself A Target Of 1.5 Million Ounces As Exploration At Palito Starts To Crank Up

By Alastair Ford

Over the last year or so Serabi Mining has pulled off a very neat trick. Having been knocked sideways by a raft of technical issues at its Palito gold-copper project in Brazil, and then battered by the storms in the global global markets, the company has managed to emerge transformed from a production company with some exploration upside into an exploration company with a certain limited amount of production. It was hard yards some of the way, and at times the directors might have been forgiven for ducking for cover and scurrying away with a view to emerging when the trouble had all blown over. But to their credit the Serabi team faced up to the market all the way along, took the criticism on the chin, bore the brunt of the anger as value ebbed away, and set about rebuilding the company from bottom up.

So, fast forward to a world in which the financial crisis is slowly receding into history, and in which gold is nevertheless still trading at a healthy US$1,100 or so, and copper’s bumping around at US$6,500 a tonne or more. It’s also a world in which Serabi no longer claims Palito as a serious production asset – “a sideshow”, in the words of chief executive Mike Hodgson – but rather looks to it instead as providing a model for an ambitious programme of very local exploration. The broad brush...