Новости за 06.03.2019

Zimbabwean Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said a rule requiring local investors to control platinum mines will be scrapped and foreigners will be allowed to own 100% in a bid to revive investment. “We are removing that indigenization rule, which is discouraging foreign direct investment,” Ncube said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Washington. “We say Zimbabwe is open for business; you can only be open if you allow ownership of 100%.”

De Beers Group Industry Services on Tuesday announced that all four of its diamond verification instruments (DVIs) submitted for testing as part of the Assure programme had received “outstanding” results. The Assure programme is a joint collaboration between the Diamond Producers Association (DPA) and Signet Jewelers, with input provided by other participants in the diamond industry and gemmological laboratories, including De Beers Group.

Australian major South32 is advancing its strategy of partnering with junior explorers to access attractive opportunities and has its eye on another project in the US state of Alaska. The miner, which currently has operations in Australia, South Africa and Arizona, has entered into an agreement with TSX-listed Freegold Ventures granting it an option to earn a 70% interest in the Shorty Creek project, about 120 km from Fairbanks.

Kazakh uranium miner Kazatomprom expects further revenue growth this year on higher prices, it said on Wednesday after posting a 112% jump in 2018 adjusted net profit on higher sales volumes and prices. London-listed Kazatomprom's net income adjusted for one-off transactions stood at 66.8-billion tenge (about $177-million), it said in a statement.

Base metals hopeful Panoramic Resources has flagged the need for at least another A$19-million, as part of the amendments to its current financing agreement over the Savannah project, in Western Australia. Panoramic has been forced to amend its current financing agreement with Macquarie Bank due to the slow ramp-up of the Savannah project, allowing for the first repayment of a A$40-million project loan to be rescheduled from March 2020 to June 2020, without changing the repayment end date of December 2021.

The share price of junior Horseshoe Metals fell by more than 11% on Wednesday after the company announced a strategic review into its Horseshoe Lights copper/gold project, in Western Australia. The ASX-listed company told shareholders that the review was prompted by several unsolicited approaches from third parties expressing an interest in the project, which is some 75km from fellow-listed Sandfire Resources’ DeGrussa copper/gold mine.

A scoping study by ASX-listed Oz Minerals has shown that converting the lower portion of the planned Carrapateena sub-level cave to a block cave, could deliver significant value for the company. Oz on Wednesday told shareholders that by converting to a block cave from 2026, the company could more than double the mine throughput rate at Carrapateena from 4.25-million tonnes to between 10-million and 12-million tonnes a year, while also increasing the life-of-mine average copper production to between 105 000 t/y and 125 000 t/y from 2026.

Dual-listed junior Thor Mining will spin out its Australian copper projects into a newly listed company called Enviro Copper. Thor inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with privately held Environmental Copper Recovery (ECR) and Environmental Metals Recovery to merge their respective interests in the Kapunda and Moonta copper projects, in South Australia, creating Enviro Copper.

Brazil's mining minister on Tuesday defended iron-ore miner Vale as vital to the country's economy, even after prosecutors accused the company of pressuring auditors to suppress evidence that its Brumadinho dam was unstable, months before the dam collapsed in January, killing hundreds. Minister of Mines and Energy Bento Albuquerque said Vale executives are likely to learn from the disaster, which killed more than 300 and sparked an outcry for tighter mining regulations.