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Gold/Mining/Energy : Precious and Base Metal Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (3385)	4/29/2002 3:24:05 PM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39344

Little Moneta Porcupine Gets Ready To Leverage Its Land Position On Destor Porcupine Fault Zone Date: April 23, 2002 An interesting situation is arising at Moneta Porupine Mines, a very small Canadian company which has been listed in Toronto since 1910. Moneta has no debt or obligations; has a very low burn rate as it owns its own offices and equipment; receives modest income from royalties and management fees; and has an interesting portfolio of exploration properties in the Porcupine Gold camp near Timmins in north east Ontario. In its time this camp has produced around 63 million ounces of gold and Moneta's properties are located along the western portion of the Abitibi greenstone belt which hosts world class mines operated by Barrick, Kinross and Placer Dome. This corridor is known as the Destor Porcupine Fault zone and it runs 120 kms from Timmins to the Quebec border. With gold coming back into favour, Rod Whyte its chairman, who has kept the Moneta boat afloat through some tricky times, is convinced that the company's time has come again. For some time now, and even before the Bre-X scandal rocked the confidence of Canada's mining community, the big companies such as Barrick, Placer Dome and Newmont had been spending their exploration budgets elsewhere in countries such as Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Australia, Papua New Buinea and Africa. The low gold price and the glaciation of Canada in the ice age which left it with 80 metres of hard rock overburden meant few bangs for their bucks, but times change. Now the gold price is improving and modern techniques to evaluate geology at depth have made great advances. During this time, however, the number of listed companies offering exposure to the Destor Pocupine fault zone has decreased from sixteen to seven and, taking into account that Barrick, Newmont, Echo Bay, Kinross and Placer Dome can hardly be said to provide meaningful exposure, it is down to just two companies, Moneta and St Andrews Goldfields who control around 20 per cent of the corridor between them. It is to their advantage, therefore, that the majors seem to be taking a much more active interest in the region. Placer Dome and Kinross, for instance, are proposing to merge their Porcupine camp interests in order to utilise the large 300,000 ozs/annum Dome Mill at the western end of the DPFZ more efficiently. At the other end Newmont and Barrick are combining their efforts to maintain ore feed for Barrick's 200,000 ozs/annum Holt McDermott mill which has only a two year life apart from a 10 year contract to toll gold for Newmont's Holloway mine. Both these moves are to the benefit of Moneta which has independent ground not too far from the Dome mill as well as a C$2 million joint venture with Placer Dome over ground just to the east of Holt McDermott. In total Moneta has twelve properties along the DPFZ, of which eleven are 100 per cent owned though around C$10 million of exploration expenditure has been committed by other companies in five gold and base metal joint ventures. How long the company will remain independent is anyone's guess, but in the meantime it is neck and neck with St Andrews which recently expanded its land position with the acquisition of the Golden Reward project which is about 16 kms east of Holloway and Hot McDermott. Maybe the two will merge and form a tier 3 company with aspirations to become a tier 1 producer. St Andrews has pretty aggressive management which has introduced Gractal Graphic geological evaluation techniques used so successfully by Goldcorp to evaluate gold mineralisation down to 1,000 metres. An interesting situation which is being compared by some to the Kirkland Lake Camp now being exploited by Foxpoint Resources. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minesite.com