News

June 24, 2009

Persian Gold Reviews Its Options As It Waits For The Bureaucratic Wheels To Turn In Iran

By Alastair Ford

“Persian Gold is very active”, says company chairman John Teeling. But you wouldn’t know it from a quick glance at the company’s roster of press releases for the year, though. Persian’s only communicated with the market four times through official announcements in 2009, and of these four, two at least look almost immaterial to activity or valuation. One, in March, stated that the company had changed its advisor to JM Finn. Another earlier release, in late January, told how John Teeling himself had pledged his 15 per cent stake in Persian as security against “personal borrowings”. But we have to go back to the first week of January for any sort of detailed exploration report. On Monday 5th, while most of the market was still blinking in the strange light of a bleak-looking new year, Persian updated on trenching at its Dalli gold-copper porphyry prospect, around 200 kilometres south-west of Tehran. There, trenching work towards the end of 2008 had showed decent enough results, including 176 metres at 0.91 grammes per tonne gold and 0.34% copper, and 188 metres at 1.1 grammes per tonne gold and 0.33% copper. Nice enough further exploration work there, as far as it goes.

But from January we then had to wait until this month for Persian to say anything else about its ground, and even then one wonders if the statutory requirement to release financial results was the only reason the silence was broken. In the accompanying commentary John Teeling states: “We have a first mover advantage, being the only European mining company active in Iran”. That simple fact is the great selling point for Persian Gold – its ex-Newmont geological advisors had scoped out the ground...