I spoke with IR at Southern Era today about the M1-pipe dispute.
One change is that the court date has been postponed 2 weeks to
February 24th. Apparently they couldn't get everyone together for
the original date. I asked whether this would be just an initial
hearing in order to setup a later court date. I was told, no the judge
would have all the facts in front of him on the 24 th and could, in
theory, make a final decision at that point. Although delays can't be
ruled out.
As others have mentioned, SUF sounds pretty confident about
their position. The other party is claiming that they are the heirs to
the mineral rights that include the M1 pipe. Their ancestors last
officially owned the mineral rights in the 1920's!. As I understand it,
South African law requires that when mineral rights are
transferred (inherited) they must be registered within 2 years of the
transfer. Therefore it looks to me like they are about 70 years too
late. Hopefully it's that simple.
I also tried to get a sense of where the M1 pipe fits in the
whole Klipspringer project, and what might happen if they can't
mine M1. They said that M1 was certainly "front and center" and
the plan was to mine M1 for about 1 1/2 years before starting to
exploit any other Klipspringer deposits. M1 is, by far, bigger and
higher grade than the other deposits. They would switch to the
Sugarbird blow if M1 can't be mined. They also said that they had
stockpiled some ore (I assume from M1)- but I don't know how
much.
VAUGHN recently suggested that the sugarbird blow was
considerably bigger than M1 but it is unfortunately much smaller.
Below is a summary of info from the different deposits that I got
from various News releases. I'd appreciate if anyone could fill in the
missing numbers. The Sugarbird blow, with ~90,000 tonnes to 60
meters would provide only about 45 days of feed to the 2000
tonne/day plant. I guess they could go deeper, but the initial
samples from this blow indicate a decrease in grade with depth.
So I guess the conclusion is that losing M1 could really hurt
(unless they can come up with another pipe in some of the nearby
prospects that they are investigating).
Klipspringer Deposits:
M1:
$479/Tonne ( 3.35 carats/tonne, $143/ carat )
400,000 tonnes (to 60m), 685,000 tonnes (to 100m)
Sugarbird Blow:
$???/tonne (0.84 carats/tonne, $???/carat)
90,000 tonnes (to 60 m)
Leopard fissure:
$87/tonne (0.81 carats/tonne, $107/carat)
??? tonnes
Hope this helps
Squidman |
