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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsheet who wrote (81998)	2/13/2002 6:48:08 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116795

Thanks. Russia looks like a rather small piece of the pie, given the land mass of the country.

To: goldsheet who wrote (81998)	2/13/2002 7:12:08 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116795

Russia has one hell of a lot of mothballed gold mines. During the central planning days only a few people were responsible for doing the exploration and geology for the whole gold producing section. I heard a talk by the head of the gold exploration division of the former Soviet, when he was in Timmins. They were basically looking for exploration and development capital to restart the old Soviet industry. (Incidentally they pointed to a mine they had found that was never developed, near the Indian border, very remote, that possessed 7 million tonnes of contained copper metal! Their gold mines, for the most part, bottom out at about 1500 feet he told us. Very different geology from Canadian. One of their plum exploration properties was the subject of a no-doubt corrupt court battle between a Canadian exploration company and the Russian government. The Russian Mafia is in there somewhere as well, if everything is normal. This baby is supposed to contain 50 million ounces in the first drill-off. Both this and the Winter Sea Archangel Diamond mine will never see foreign production or ownership, no matter what the Vancouver press releases tell you. The trouble with exploring in Russia is they do not make it cheap or easy. You have to rotate your crews home every 16 weeks by law. In addition you can bring the square root of zilch into the country to use as exploration of development equipment. Ind addition there is next to nothing useful in that same category to buy there. If you do get to the development stage of an old producer, you are required to support ALL the former employees and their housing as if you were a latter-day communist government. This is not cheap. The same goes for all the the Stans: Kazahk, Kyrg, Turkmeni and so on. If you do this and get near production the usual law suit about ownership, operation and escrow funds erupts. All the money you put up as cash guarantees in escrow with the government is now missing. And they want you to put up more money. Taxes are multi-layered such that they add up to more than we pay even in Canada, which is hard to imagine. All foreign materials and equipment, vitally necessary to get mining going require bribes and exorbitant fees to bring into the country. Repatriation of capital once in production is further in doubt. Hindrance by organized crime wanting protection money is another expense that is not minor. In short it is better dealing with the Saskatchewan government if you owned a Potash mine, which is almost unfathomable if you had ever been there. Russia is sign_on_the_line_and_let_us_steal_your_mine sort of country. This guarantees that there will never be any foreign development in that country to bring their gold industry to a production level that will hurt us. And you can be sure they don't have the money themselves. If they did, they would not spend it there. EC<:-}