Companies: BNC    CFM    CIR    HGM    PMS    POG    TMG   

Companies run by mining entrepreneurs have fared better than many in the recent stock market holocaust. In a sector where risk abounds and people matter at least as much as projects, we rate six of the more active as if they were films, where extra excitement can bring extra pleasure and extra pain

Richard Prickett, (U Certificate), chairman of Aim newcomer HPD Exploration, is basking in a glow of investor approval. This has not yet been dispelled by a 16 per cent fall in HPD's shares since it transferred from Ofex last month, raising £1.7 million at 14p.

As boss of mining group Brancote, he achieved a price of £160 million last year when he sold company, with its Esquel gold prospect in Argentina, to the North American Meridien group. Brancote set up HPD in 2000 to house its interests outside Esquel.

Under the entrepreneurial Prickett, HPD shares more than trebled before the move to Aim. Last autumn, HPD joined with Argentina's powerful Miguens Bemberg family to explore a large, potentially gold-bearing area in the southern region of Patagonia.

Through a joint venture, HPD is drilling in Argentina's Rio Negro, Chubut and Santa Cruz provinces, with a respected exploration team assembled by Prickett. According to Prickett, HPD had £2 million cash before the float, to pursue attractive possibilities.

The genial Prickett has support from several institutions, including Invesco, with stakes in HPD. Everything hinges on what the Argentine prospects yield, but he seems better placed than many to pull it off again.

(U) Prickett's track record, local contacts and City support provide comfort.

Ivan Koulakov, (12A Certificate), managing director of Highland Gold, which came to Aim with blue chip backing in December, represents a new breed of mining entrepreneur for the City. A Russian engineer, he became head of ZAO MNV resources group in 1998, aged only 29.

ZAO MNV identified several gold prospects. One, Mnogovershinnoe, Russia's fourth largest gold deposit, aims to produce 175,000 oz this year.

Highland Gold, set up in Jersey by South African mining group Harmony, acquired ZAO MNV. The deal gave Koulakov 22.75 per cent of Highland.

Seen as more of a technocrat than an old-style Russian oligarch, Koulakov does not carry a gun, is said to listen to advice and is focused on building up Highlands' reserves. The company recently won a mining licence at another project, Darasun, where it claims measured, indicated and inferred resources of 3.1 million oz — though the 'probable reserve' figure is a third of that.

Highland raised £20 million at 190p through broker WH Ireland, surged to 260p and now trades at 224p. Pre-float backers, including some of the Fleming City dynasty, paid a fraction of the launch price for Highland, which remains a gamble, though one with impressive backing.

(12A) Backing from Harmony and the Flemings offsets the country risk.

Algy Cluff, (PG Certificate) awaits a delayed feasibility report into Cluff Mining's Blue Ridge platinum project in South Africa's Bushveld. Now expected before July, Cluff hopes it will confirm Blue Ridge's potential to produce 200,000 oz of platinum a year.

A bigger prize could be Sheba's Ridge, a joint venture with South African giant Anglo Platinum. Cluff agreed to pay Anglo £5 million in shares and cash for 65 per cent of Sheba and can go to 87.5 per cent for another £7.8 million.

As yet, ex-soldier and Spectator chairman Algy Cluff, former Chinese oil prospector and Zimbabwean gold miner, has given shareholders a rollercoaster ride. Cluff Mining's original Gabonese niobium prospects left the City cold and the shares fell from 225p to below 150p.

Cluff smartly moved into platinum and the price surged to 293.5p last June. Technical hold-ups and fears about South Africa's 'Black empowerment' mining laws have knocked them back to 160p.

Cluff, who brought on board well-connected 'prison graduate' Mzi Khumalo, claims he can live with the regime, leaving the shares a punt on projects and platinum. He sold his previous company, Cluff Resources, for £90 million and, now pondering prospects in Mongolia, would doubtless like to stage a repeat.

(PG) He has done it before and could do it again.

Peter Hambro, (PG Certificate), former chairman of disappointing performer Gold Mines of Sardinia, has won more fans with Peter Hambro Mining, his Far East Russian gold play. Floated on Aim last year by broker Canaccord with a £1.75 million placing at 130p, PHM raised £16.8 million lately at 175p (after falling to 81p).

Hambro himself and PHM's Russian director Pavel Maslovsky are selling shares into the placing. But the market liked a simultaneously-announced threefold estimated resource increase at PHM's Pioneer project in Siberia to 9.4 million oz (the more definite reserve estimate is only 9.8 per cent up at 1.78 million oz).

With a board including veteran mining tycoon Sir Rudolph Agnew (and Hambro's own son Jay), PHM produced 72,000 oz last year from its Pokrovskiy mine, (down from 90,000 oz). The company says it expects to produce 136,000 oz this year at costs that are $200 an ounce below today's gold price.

Hambro plans to bid £19 million in shares and cash for another deposit at Tokur and to bid for part of the Matrosov mine in the gold-rich Magadan area. Sceptics say American group Homestake walked away some time ago from some of PHM's present projects, but Hambro says PHM has got it right.

(PG) Resource increases could compensate for the risk.

Willie McLucas, (15 Certificate), the cheerfully hyperactive former stockbroker who brought Toronto-based Thistle Mining to Aim last year with a £605,000 placing at 20p, has an ambitious plan. He intends to double gold output at the President Steyn mines in South Africa before 2005 from more than 200,000 oz a year.

McLucas says banks will fund a £10 million process plant. He is bullish on another Thistle gold project, at Masbate in the Philippines, with two million oz reserves.

It would cost Kuwaiti-backed Thistle, valued at £43 million, £20 million to bring Masbate into production. McLucas claims, with gold at $330 an ounce, it could make £20 million in its first year.

Costs at President Steyn, formerly mined by Anglo, were last September put at more than $250 an ounce and it has cautiously hedged production. That implies a lower margin than elsewhere.

McLucas had a setback some years ago with a Scottish company Waverley Mining. Its key mine, Moncktonhall, was flooded, the shares plummeted, McLucas quit and Waverley has now become a mining and quarrying penny stock called Palmaris.

Shares in Thistle, which raised £4 million in January and might come back for more, trade at 27p. One for the bold.

(15) McLucas invites complexity, faces big challenges, but could win handsomely.

Phil Edmonds, (18 Certificate), the Zambian-born Test cricketer-turned-wheeler-dealer, has returned to his native continent for mining projects. The former spin bowler, whose activities have ranged from British health farms to Philippine gold ventures, has three Aim companies looking for deals in southern Africa.

Southern African Resources has a stake in the Leeuwkop platinum group metals deposit in the Bushveld. It has expanded this somewhat incestuously by issuing shares to Central African Mining and Exploration, another Edmonds Aim company (hitherto seeking tantalum in Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe), in exchange for Central's holding in BizAfrika, a local 'Black empowerment' group.

With Southern African's shares at 3p, that values Central's BizAfrika stake at £1.1 million and BizAfrika at £11 million, without paying a penny, and leaves both Southern and Central's assets supported by Leeuwkop. Australian investor Bruce Rowan has big stakes in Central, whose shares have slid from 7p last year to 2.75p, and in Southern, at 3p, between a 4.75p high and a 1.75p low.

In February Edmonds floated yet another company, Capricorn, to seek mining projects in Angola, Mozambique, Congo and Zambia, at 1p a share. Now at 1.5p, its appeal, as with Southern and Central, is essentially speculative.

(18) An intricate deal lover, Edmonds thinks he has another one lined up.