News

June 24, 2009

Oxus Gold Is Fairly Confident That It Can Raise The Money To Put Its Underground Sulphide Mine In Uzbekistan Into Production

By Alastair Ford

Richard Shead and Oxus Gold parted company for several years during the middle of this current decade, while former chief Bill Trew ran riot with the company. The ups and downs of Oxus during that time have been well chronicled here and elsewhere, but now Bill’s long gone, and Richard’s back, seated at the head of the table, as executive chairman. Richard’s not particularly one to rake up the past, so it’s by way of a fairly short preliminary to a more detailed discussion on the latest news from Oxus that he states the following: “when I came back we re-looked at the whole company and the portfolio of assets. What we’d identified way back as the best asset was the underground sulphide, and it still is”.

There are many facets in the story of Bill Trew’s involvement with Oxus, but one is that his engineering company MAED held the contract to build the open pit gold mine and associated plant at Amantaytau, and so, when Oxus looked like it might go under, he stepped in to safeguard his own contracts. Well, and good, but a long time ago now. The oxides at the Centralny zone of the Amantaytau mine, which is what got Oxus going back in the days of Bill and MAED, are now all mined out, and what...