NQ Minerals plc (NEX:NQMI) Chairman David Lenigas caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the Beaconsfield acquisition and what investors can expect going forward.
Q1: First off, congratulations on this morning’s acquisition of the Beaconsfield Gold Mine. Can you tell us more about this and what does it mean for the business going forwards?
A1: We signed the deal in February, of course it’s quite complicated buying an asset from an administrator for a company that’s in administrations, so it’s taken a lot of due diligence, a lot of legal work. The deal finally closed this morning in Australia which has been fabulous and there’s been a lot of excellent press already popping up on the TV and radio channels and newspap0ers.
It’s a project that very close to the heart of many Tasmanians, it’s been a longstanding supporter of jobs in the area, the mine closed in 2012 because of the gold price, the gold price is a whole lot higher and there’s a lot of gold down there.
We managed to go through the due diligence process, work with the government there on the best way to move the project forward and we closed the deal this morning.
So, it’s a very big event for NQ Minerals.
Q2: It sounds very exciting news, what more can investors expect from NQ Minerals in the rest of 2020?
A2: There’s a lot of things happening within the Company itself but on the Beaconsfield front, we plan to have people stepping onto the ground, we’ve already got a couple of employees already on the books as of today.
The plan is to refurbish the plant at Beaconsfield to 2020 safety standards, it hasn’t been operating for about 8 years but it’s been on good care and maintenance. So, there’ll be a lot of news coming from as we progress the plant upgrades, there’s a lot of surface geological resource and reserve work to be done so there’s lots of news to come there. We’d like to have Beaconsfield back into the ‘we’re pouring gold’ mode by the end of this year or early next year but hopefully the end of this year so a lot of news coming there.
Our flagship operation, the Hellyer gold mine, not far from the Beaconsfield acquisition, we’re going through big plant improvement programmes there at the moment so hopefully there’ll be some good news on that. With the way that the world commodity prices are going to get Hellyer into a bigger state of production is something we’ve been chasing for a while so there’ll be lots of news on that.
We’re working on restructuring the Company’s corporate debt that was put together to fund the opening of Hellyer and that seems to be progressing quite well so lots of news to come on many fronts.
