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Asian expedition was productive but expensive too, so can you help?
11p HKT Thursday, June 27, 2012
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Maybe you've heard the old story about the hand-written message on the slip of paper in the Chinese dessert: "Help! I'm a prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory!"
It's not quite that bad at GATA's roving headquarters right now but your secretary/treasurer's long expedition to the western shores of the Pacific Ocean has been a bigger expense than we're used to undertaking even as we hope that it has been unusually productive -- appearances on Asia's two widest-reaching television networks, Channel NewsAsia in Singapore and CNBC Asia in Hong Kong (http://www.gata.org/node/11490), and presentations at financial conferences in both cities, including Standard Chartered's "Earth's Resources" conference, a venue a bit more respectable than those to which contrarians and troublemakers commonly are invited.
The expedition required an updating and compressing of your secretary/treasurer's "stump speech," a product that has been evolving for years now. While the speech is now shorter -- readable aloud in about 15 minutes -- and more of an outline aimed at people new to the subject, it is still fully annotated with references and links to all the important original source material. With luck it will be a valuable introduction especially for financial journalists, should any turn up over the next few years:
http://www.gata.org/node/11507
You can help by sending it to any investment firms, mining companies, and news organizations with which you have any connection. And of course you can help -- especially if you haven't already -- by making a financial contribution to GATA despite the especially hard times being endured right now by the monetary metals sector. Whether this expedition was worthwhile or not, it has run our modest finances way down and we don't do much fundraising even as we're ready to continue our work if the support is still there. As always, until the World Gold Council with its multi-million-dollar annual budget decides to get serious and confront the elephant in the room, surreptitious market rigging by central banks, we have to depend on you:
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Prophecy Platinum Announces Wellgreen Preliminary Economic Assessment:
38% Pre-Tax IRR, $3.0 Billion NPV, and a 37-Year Mine Life
Company Press Release
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada -- Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) reports the results of an independent NI 43-101-compliant preliminary economic assessment for its fully owned Wellgreen nickel-copper-platinum group metals project in the Yukon Territory.
The independent assessment, prepared by Tetra Tech, evaluated a base case of an open-pit mine (with a mining rate of 111,500 tonnes per day), an on-site concentrator (with a milling rate of 32,000 tonnes per day), and an initial capital cost of $863 million. The project is expected to produce (in concentrate) 1.959 billion pounds of nickel, 2.058 billion pounds of copper, and 7.119 million ounces of platinum, palladium, and gold during a mine life of 37 years with an average strip ratio of 2.57.
The financial highlights of the preliminary economic assessment, shown in U.S. dollars, are as follows:
Payback period: 3.55 years
Initial capital investment: $863 million
IRR pre-tax (100% equity): 38 percent
NPV pre-tax (8% discount): $3 billion
Mine life: 37 years
Total mill feed: 405.3 million tonnes
Mill throughput: 32,000 tonnes per day
Prophecy Chairman John Lee says: "We are pleased with the preliminary economic assessment results. The numbers indicate that Wellgreen is one of most exciting mineral projects in the Yukon. The company is drilling to upgrade and expand the resource base. The infrastructure is excellent as the project is only 1,400 meters in altitude and 14 kilometers from the paved Alaska Highway, which leads to the Haines deep seaport. Discussions are under way with support from local stakeholders regarding permitting and logistics."
For the complete press release, please visit:
http://prophecyplat.com/news_2012_june18_prophecy_platinum_announces_res...
Join GATA here:
Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Thursday-Friday, September 27-28, 2012
Toronto Sheraton Centre Hotel
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/toronto-resource-investment-conference
New Orleans Investment Conference
Wednesday-Saturday, October 24-27, 2012
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
http://www.neworleansconference.com/
* * *
Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006:
http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html
Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:
Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:
http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
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Sona Discovers Potential High-Grade Gold Mineralization
at Blackdome in British Columbia -- 13.6g over 1.5 Meters
From a Company Press Release
November 22, 2011
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With its latest surface diamond drilling program at its 100-percent-owned, formerly producing Blackdome gold mine in southern British Columbia, Sona Resources Corp. has discovered a potentially high-grade gold-mineralized area, with one hole intersecting 13.6 grams of gold in 1.5 meters of core drilling.
"We intersected a promising new mineralized zone, and we feel optimistic about the assay results," says Sona's president and CEO, John P. Thompson. "We have undertaken an aggressive exploration program that has tested a number of target zones. Our discovery of this new gold-bearing structure is significant, and it represents a positive development for the company."
Sona aims to bring its permitted Blackdome mill back into production over the next year and a half, at a rate of 200 tonnes per day, with feed from the formerly producing Blackdome mine and the nearby Elizabeth gold deposit property. A positive preliminary economic assessment by Micon International Ltd., based on a gold price of $950 per ounce over eight years, has estimated a cash cost of $208 per tonne milled, or $686 per gold ounce recovered.
For the company's complete press release, please visit:
http://www.sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR18_2011-opt.pdf
