Companies: CEY    CLF    ZOX   

A tough new issue market has not stopped bolder spirits from trying their luck. Aussie entrepreneur John Pollard has raised £9 million at 19.5p for promising Zeehan Zinc through Libertas Capital and says he expects an off-take deal with a major Chinese group by early April for production from the company’s potentially rich zinc, lead and silver tenements in Western Tasmania.

Zeehan’s prospects are helped by infrastructure in place, a £2 million tailings stockpile and chances of a reasonably swift move to production. Elsewhere, Cluff Gold wants to tap AIM for £15.4 million at 68p to develop gold prospects in Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire.

A somewhat more speculative air surrounds Nighthawk. This is the vehicle with gas prospects in Utah that small mining company player David Bramhill (late of Cambridge Mineral Resources) has declared he wants to float on AIM with a £30 million market value, as forecast by Growth Company Investor last summer.

Financier Andrew Regan is contemplating a diamond tailings treatment float, while banker’s son and infrastructure project financier Shahrukh Khan, 35, and Conrad Windham, 23 year-old former assistant to share tipster Tom Winnifrith and a director of PLUS-quoted All Star Minerals, are out to raise £1.2 million on PLUS for Oracle Coalfields to develop coal prospects in Pakistan’s Sind province.

With backing from serial investor Bruce Rowan, Oracle claims an inferred resource of 365 million tonnes and a surer indicated resource of 24 million tonnes from two boreholes. The issue, also flagged up by GCI last August, has speculative promise for the strong-nerved.

ZincOx moots finance choices

Andrew Woollett, who has turned once-faltering zinc project developer ZincOx into a zinc and iron tailings recycler, says the AIM-quoted company is considering ‘various financing strategies’ after finishing pre-feasibility studies on an integrated US recycling project. This involves a new £54 million facility in Ohio and a zinc plant at Big River in St Louis, to produce and process 48,000 tonnes of zinc and 50,000 tonnes of pig iron.

Woollett claims net present values of £309 million and £65 million respectively for Ohio and Big River, and hints at internal rates of return of 20 and 35 per cent. The company plans to develop another processing plant at Aliaga in Turkey.

Canadian zinc giant Teck Cominco recently increased its stake in ZincOx from eight per cent to 11.5 per cent. Recommended by Growth Company Investor at 129.5p in May 2005, ZincOx’s previously depressed shares now stand at 284p and are worth holding in case Woollett pulls it off again.

Centamin goes ahead

Josef El-Raghy, the Australian-accented boss of AIM-quoted Centamin Egypt, has won board approval to develop the Sukari Gold project, which a feasibility study suggests could contain a resource of 8.26 million ounces of gold. The study envisages as a ‘base case’ producing an average 200,000 ounces of gold a year for 15 years, at a capital cost of £108 million and operating costs of $290 an ounce, against a current gold price of $657.

Centamin says it hopes to arrange project funding, involving ‘limited’ gold hedging, by the end of June. Its shares, cited by GCI as potential outperformers at 26.5p in October, have risen 47 per cent to 39p. Some profit-taking might be prudent, but there should be more to go for.