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Gold/Mining/Energy : Steppe Gold (SPE:V) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Stokes who wrote (643)	2/18/1998 7:55:00 PM
From: John Menzies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1248

**Interesting Article on economic reforms - one small step. ALMATY, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's pension reform got a boost on Friday when the first two asset management companies received licences under which pension funds can start accepting payments from the population. The two three-year licences were granted by the ex-Soviet state's National Securities Commission to ABN-AMRO Asset Management Company and to ATK. ''This licence shows that pension reform is a reality and is not just for show,'' Aidar Akhmetov, head of ABN-AMRO Asset Managing Company set up jointly by ABN-AMRO Bank Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan's largest private bank Kazkommertsbank, told Reuters. ATK was set up by the U.S. company Amitana International Trade Company, Inc. According to local legislation, the appearance of asset-management companies allows new pension funds to start accumulating payments from the population. Eight funds, including a state-run one, have already been registered in Kazakhstan, which formally launched its pension reform on January 1. Kazakhstan, a resource-rich Central Asian state of 16.7 million people with territory five times the size of France, aims to set up a system of private pension funds which are expected eventually to become important institutional investors. The idea of establishing private pension funds was partly borrowed from Chile, which started reforming its national pension scheme in 1981. Like Chile, Kazakhstan -- seen as a pioneer in pension reform among the post-communist states -- hopes that investments by pension funds through asset management companies might help develop a number of domestic markets. These markets include the fledgling stock exchange. Amid a lack of equities traded and low investor interest, the exchange has been lifeless ever since its launch in September last year. But the government hopes that pension funds might breathe new life into the inert stock market because Kazakh legislation requires that they must spend no less than 20 percent to buy shares in large local companies seen as future blue chips. "I think these hopes are realistic," Akhmetov said. The authorities also hope that the funds built up by pension funds will support the domestic Treasury bill market, from which many foreign investors have fled to much higher yields on the Russian one. Pension funds will be allowed to invest up to 50 percent of their money in such secure papers as T-bills. The government is now struggling to regain the trust of Kazakhs, many of whom have already suffered from the country's hasty voucher privatisation and numerous bankruptcies of local banks. ''We have learned a lot from those lessons, and we already possess efficient mechanisms of control over pension funds and asset management companies,'' National Commission Chairman Aben Bektasov told a news conference. He said that at the initial stage of the pension reform, whose total length is 30 years, the sceptical population was likely to prefer to invest in the state-run pension fund. ''In the first one or two years the lion's share of all pension payments might go to the state-run fund,'' Akhmetov said. ''But then the money will flow steadily into private ones.''

To: John Stokes who wrote (643)	2/18/1998 8:24:00 PM
From: John Menzies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1248

Base metal deposit exploitation: John , now you are getting into the techncial stuff. The Electrowinning part of the process is the last stage. The entire process involves firstly mining and crushing the ore then putting the metals of economic importancee say copper- zinc - gold and/or silver into solution. This is where it can get complex. When you have an oxide copper or gold deposit this is most often pretty simple. Acid will dissolve copper (and sometimes zinc) and cyanide will do the same for gold and silver. It gets more complex when you have a combination of say copper and gold. The challenge is that the concentration of metals in such a solution is too low to economically run an electrowinning cell. The solution for copper is to use a solvent to extract the copper from the acidic solution and then strip this with hot more concentrated acid to produce a solution with a high concentration of copper which can then be placed in an EW cell. The result high purity copper. The main expense the electricity - a lot of it. You can do something similar with some zinc deposits. The essense of this is that you have to be able to get the economic metals into solution at reaonable cost. This is usually quite easy with oxide deposits. With deposits like Kosmurun and for example the Western Copper deposit in Mexico or Kidd Creekm in Canada only a small portion of the metals would be soluble in a low concentration acid solution ( you can dissolve almost anything if you use very strong acid - but the cost goes up) To recover the metals you have to oxidise the sulphides- a relatively simple process. There are a number of methods used fo this including roasting the ore or a concentrate of the ore and smelting or leaching the metals of interest. some other technlogies are BIOX (bacterial oxidation) whch is having increasing application and various hydromet processes involving pressure and temperature and various reageants to oxidise the sulphides and occasionally destroy activated carbon etc. The answer to your question was probably more than you were expecting - hope this was educational and reasonably accurate. In the near term the Sulphide deposits which the company is evaluating will produce some gold metal but also a concentrate which will require smelting. I am sure that in the future the hydro met techniques under development will largely replace smelting.