Where Did The Good Lord Put The Mineralization? Liberty International Has A Way To Find Out
By Alastair Ford
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Len Lindstrom, managing director of Liberty International Mineral Corporation, cuts an unusual figure in the corporate maelstrom of London. All smiles and sparkly eyes, and sporting a leather jacket that wouldn’t look out of place at a Bulgarian police station, he hit town, amongst other things, to attend a conference on tungsten and to make connections ahead of a proposed listing of Liberty on the main board in Canada later this year.
But before we get to that, for jaded Londoners, we must first ask and then answer the question: “Who is Len Lindstrom?” The answer is many-sided. For our immediate purposes, he’s the man who cut big deals that tied up a huge section of Liberia, where he’s now drilling on two gold properties, and working up several more. He’s also picked up a huge land package in Canada. However if you type his name into the search function on Liberty International’s website you draw a blank. To be fair, if you dig a little deeper, his name does pop up on a few press releases that are in a PDF format that a search engine can’t read. But corporate profile, there is none.
Type his name into Google, though, and that’s another matter. There you get a lot more joy. Len’s travelled the world, and not just in his capacity as mining entrepreneur. Operating out of Kelowna, British Columbia, his work as an international evangelising minister is clearly outlined at his own eponymous website at Lenlindstromministries.com. There’s an illuminating page of photographs purporting to show miracles associated with his ministry, and not a leather jacket in sight. Now, it’s often said in mining that there’s no accounting for where the good Lord put the mineralization, but here we have a mining entrepreneur who appears to have a hotline. Perhaps that’s why brokers are apparently falling over themselves to arrange funding for Liberty. Certainly the way Len tells it, the licenses he’s managed to tie up don’t fall far short of miraculous themselves.
Len is no fool, and he clearly knows a bit about the business he’s moved into. For yes, sad though it may be for the faithful, the last posting under the “news” section of his evangelical website dates back to May 2006, and it appears that he’s moved into mining full time. Or at least exploration. He can reel off grades like a card-counting mathematician at the Black Jack table. For example, up on Liberty’s Copper Cat tenement in British Columbia, an old 54 tonne chunk of rock that was dug out of the ground back in 1921 was found to contain 127.671 ounces of gold, 83.68 ounces of silver, and 1017 pounds of copper. Len delivers these numbers off the top of his head, with out recourse to notes or a presentation of any kind.
Up in British Columbia, Liberty, which, almost as if there was some Blind Watchmaker at work, by co-incidence also works out of Kelowna, has staked 3,500 square kilometres of ground. There the company, says Len, will prospect for gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, molybdenum and tungsten. He’s got three drill rigs at work, and once the results begin to come in Liberty, will, he says, “start making a racket”. Here at Minesite none of us have ever attended one of Len’s mass prayer meetings, but we don’t doubt he’ll make a racket if he wants to. Watching him network simply within the confines of our own office was a joy to behold, and would have gladdened the heart of any PR man that had happened to be watching. He’s already got 600 investors in Liberty, which to date, has simply been funded by private placements. So far, he says, he’s raised US$14 million.
A Canadian listing is on the cards, though, and will probably be done by the end of the year, God willing. Len’s not sure exactly how much the Liberty valuation will be, but it’s likely to be of the order of several hundreds of millions of dollars. A C$50-C$100 million fundraising will go with it. That ought to be enough to get brokers packing the churches out to pray for a piece of the action. There’s also, apparently, a major mining company stalking Liberty in the background.
Whether said major is primarily interested in the Canadian or the Liberian assets isn’t clear yet. Len concedes that at the moment, Liberty really looks like two companies packaged temporarily together. As to whether they’ll be split apart either before or after the proposed listing, he says: “I’m going to get a lot of counsel on that”. Actually, there may ultimately be several companies inside the Liberty umbrella, just waiting to burst out. To add to the African portfolio, there’s also a property in Ghana of which scant mention is made. In Liberia, where Len’s ministry to the people of Monrovia and elsewhere was widely reported, and, it seems, much appreciated, work on two of the Liberty’s 14 gold properties is well advanced. “We’re expecting both of them to be world class”, says Len. What exactly he means by that isn’t clear, but consultants SGS Lakefield are carrying out much of the work, so the forthcoming numbers will certainly stand or fall on their own merits.
How will the market ultimately value Liberty? Well, obviously hard numbers would be helpful. Geological work is ongoing all across Liberty’s prospects, but as Len himself says, this is “an advanced grass roots stage” company. Once results from RC drilling on the two lead Liberian properties come in, we’ll know more. In the meantime one can only speculate whether the markets will deliver a premium to a man who states one of his aims on his website as being to “plunder hell and populate heaven”, a man who has witnessed many miracles and wondrous events. You’d think they would, wouldn’t you? |
