Public Company News

Peppermint Innovation will develop an app and web tool to provide money transfers to poor, cash-constrained Filipinos as part of a service provider agreement signed with the largest cooperative in the Philippines. The deal brings 300 affiliated cooperatives and one million individual members of the Mindanao Alliance of Self-Help Societies-Southern Philippines Educational Cooperative Centre into Peppermint’s financial frame.

With one positive feasibility study on its desk, Mongolian coking coal explorer, Aspire Mining, has launched another. The first already shows the viability of a rail line to the east of the giant Ovoot coal play and the second will assess the viability of a line to the west. The proposed new line will open up Russian Chinese trade opportunities and underwrite Ovoot in the process.

ASX listed EMU N.L now has three drill rigs working at its Chilean gold project where good recent weather and smooth operations has sparked hope for the imminent release of a flood of assays. The Perth-based explorer is committed to making up for lost time and completing at least 6000m of drilling before the southern hemisphere winter rolls in.

Classic Minerals has announced some encouraging high-grade gold drilling intercepts from the Lady Magdalene deposit at its Forrestania Gold Project. Results include 6.5 metres grading 3.30g/t gold, including 1m @ 9.52g/t gold. The results confirm the deposit contains cross-cutting, shoot style, high-grade gold lodes that are similar to the nearby Lady Ada open pit that was historically mined at 8.81g/t gold.

Another impressive round of high-grade drill hits from Draig Resources has extended the strike length and depth of the company’s Tribune Lode gold discovery parallel to the famed Bellevue mine in the Wiluna belt. Mineralisation has now been confirmed over a strike length of 550 metres and one of the next priorities is to test for continuity with the Southern Belle Lode 800 metres further south.

ASX listed Blackstone Minerals has announced it will recommence drilling at its high grade Little Gem cobalt-gold project in British Columbia shortly, using a specialist local contractor. The company also released anomalous gold assay results from a multi-element stream sediment geochemical sampling program at the project, extending the limits of the target zone out to 1.8km.

Ironbark Zinc’s Citronen project is rapidly moving from the drawing board to ground-breaking reality as the Perth-based company prepares to ship equipment to Greenland during the northern hemisphere summer. Landed cargoes, scheduled for mid-August, will trigger the start of the mine construction phase aimed at fulfilling the production potential of one the largest undeveloped zinc projects in the world.

An investment bank and research house has set a price target for Hot Chili at a 500% premium to recent trades, based on the value of the aspiring copper producer’s Productora project in Chile. EverBlu Capital also sees several scenarios where Hot Chili could be valued many times higher because of a strengthening copper market and smart moves to transform the economics of its flagship Chilean copper project.

King River Copper has laid claim to the highest-grade vanadium concentrate of any Australian mineral deposit after successfully completing metallurgical tests on the company’s massive Speewah project in the Kimberley. Perth-based King River said the bar had been raised by grinding and separating test work that produced a magnetite-ilmenite concentrate of 2.11% vanadium pentoxide, elevating Speewah to vanadium royalty status.

Myanmar Metals has announced some spectacular high grade base metal, silver and cobalt assays from its first drilling program at the world class Bawdwin deposit in Myanmar. Results include 46 metres grading 9.7% lead and 116g/t silver from the base of the historic open pit and 19 metres @ 6.6% lead, 187g/t silver, 0.5% copper and 0.11% cobalt from a depth of just 3 metres.

Southern Gold’s hopes for a rapid restart of a number of high-grade gold mines in South Korea have been boosted, with new investigations at the mine revealing it to be in excellent condition. Joint venture partner Bluebird Merchant Ventures reported the mine has been frozen in time since the 1970s, when a US$140 gold price brought about a premature close.

Maiden drilling by Magmatic Resources at the MacGregors gold prospect in central NSW has identified a 2km-long belt of gold mineralisation and doubled the best gold grades achieved by previous explorers. The latest results have established MacGregors, part of the Parkes JV with Japan’s JOGMEC, as the company’s third highly prospective gold project less than a year after listing on the ASX.