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Lomiko Metals Live@PDAC
By Resource Intelligence · March 28, 2011 · 10:11 am · Leave a Comment
Resource Intelligence Interviews Lomiko Metals’ President and CEO Paul Gill
See the company’s profile HERE, including resource calculators, charts, news and more.
RI: Paul Gill, can you tell investors a little bit about Lomiko Metals Vines Lake project and what is going on there?
PG: Lomiko Metals has acquired the Vines Lake project, which is about 1,600 hectares in northern BC. It has flown the property with magnetic resonance and has some targets identified that are very interesting.
RI: So you are going to be exploring those targets but one of the other things that you already know and is a big plus for you is that you are on the doorstep of what was Hawthorn Gold Corp’s Table Mountain and Taurus Gold projects, one was a producing mine and the other a very high-grade project as well.
PG: The Table Mountain mine has 24 g/t and 18 g/t veins that are discovered already. Our mineralization and the mapping of our mineralization indicates that it is very similar to what Table Mountain has. The Hawthorne project has a 270 tonne per day mill that is permitted and that makes a big difference in that area. The Cassiar camp has 120 years of mineral extraction and over 2 million ounces have been removed from the area. [Lomiko Metals is located in the south western corner of the Cassiar Gold Camp.] There is placer gold in the streams there and there are vein type deposits, so we are very excited about the potential there.
RI: You are an early stage project, so take us through the next couple of years and what has to happen to give your investors the key signals that this is something that you’re going to pursue.
PG: We’ve raised $400,000 recently in order to do exploration. The first thing that we will do is induced polarization over the top of the targeted areas and then stream sediment sampling to confirm the parallel strike length of the area, and then more specifically drilling on the areas that come up with those three types of surveys.
RI: How big is the project and on what percentage of it have you seen the indicators that there is mineralization here?
PG: The project is small – 1,600 hectares – but the location is very key. We are sandwiched in between where the batholith, where the magma arose and where the host rock was. We have where the geological contact occurred and that is an area where dissemination has potential. So beyond just the veins that we feel are there, there is a possibility for a larger disseminated deposit that will be explored at later stages as we develop and work on the project.
RI: What other indicators have you had that mineralization may be similar to something like Hawthorne had before it was acquired?
PG: The key indicators from the magnetic resonance surveys that have occurred. We did the same magnetic resonance testing as Hawthorne did on their property and they had vein systems that were highlighted on theirs that were actually produced from, whereas we have additional highlighted areas in where vein structures have occurred and in fact are highlighted on our property. We are very interested in pursuing these and discovering if there is mineralization from veins or dyke structures.
RI: How important is it right now to hit the ground running with this? With gold at $1,400 an ounce obviously you have some impetus behind you and the market to see new projects come to light.
PG: I think there is a special situation occurring in northern BC in the Cassiar district in which Hawthorne is being acquired, for instance, by China Mineral Holdings. I think that makes a very important situation for us. We want to be able to either have the ability to sell the project to them after proving ounces or in turn use the mill that is there to process the material. The advantage of having infrastructure, highway access, power access and having the mill nearby is fantastic; you don’t get that often. That is the key to any of these kinds of projects to make them feasible.
RI: Do you think with the way the market is right now that financing is readily available for early-stage projects like yours?
PG: Absolutely. We’ve just closed two small financings of $250,000 and $400,000 in flow-through and we have a $5 million equity credit line which we can tap into when and if there is a discovery.
RI: You’ve also got some pretty major shareholders such as Pinetree Capital.
PG: Yes. We have Sheldon Inwentash who is a major holder of 17 percent of our company. Management as well owns a good percentage. So we are in the game and we’re there to make a discovery and we’re there to get a good return on our investment. The history that I have had in the business is that I like to start projects at a very early stage and move them along to a point which gives a good return for the early investors.
RI: In your experience what indicators are there that you can do this, take a project from a very early stage and move it along showing shareholder growth?
PG: I think that we’ve had some good success in the past. I was an early stage investor and management at Norsemont Mining in 2003 to 2006 and what we found is that if you can make a discovery you can attract high-level elite management, and we had a chance to have Patrick Evans come aboard and that project was recently purchased by HudBay.
I think that this is the key element. My focus is on creating a discovery in the area. We have infrastructure and we have all of the elements that these mining specialists look for. We need to make that discovery and work from there.
