30th Jun 2016 10:34
LONDON (Alliance News) - China Nonferrous Gold Ltd Thursday said the construction of its flagship gold project is nearing completion and should reach its initial production capacity in the last quarter of 2016 before the second phase of work starts in 2017.
The miner is developing the Pakrut gold project in the Republic of Tajikistan and reported a significantly narrower pretax loss in 2015 of USD6.2 million compared to the USD15.7 million loss recorded in 2014 after a series of one-off costs were not repeated and costs fell.
China Nonferrous Gold booked a USD1.0 million expense to cover the company's listing and capital reorganisation in 2014 and a USD9.5 million impairment that were both absent from the company's results in 2015.
Administrative costs also fell to USD3.2 million from USD5.0 million, but the foreign exchange loss was higher year-on-year in 2015, amounting to USD3.0 million from the small USD151,000 loss last year.
"As the chairman of the board, it gives me great pleasure to present the chairman's statement at a time when the group has made significant progress. The year ending December 31, 2015 witnessed two significant milestones for our company with the completion of the project construction and first gold poured at our Pakrut project," said Xiang Wu.
China Nonferrous Gold is currently constructing its wholly-owned Pakrut gold project, which lies around 120.0 kilometres north-east of the capital city Dushanbe. The mine, plant and tailings dam are all being built at present.
In 2015, the miner finished constructing the nearly all of the workshops, the processing plant and most of the supporting facilities and the plant was then commissioned at the end of September. Construction of the smelting plant was also completed in 2015 and the plant was commissioned in October 2015, as planned.
The construction and installation of 73 kilometres of external power lines up to sites and construction of two electrical substations at Pakrut and Hamza have been completed. From July 2015, electricity from the national grid began to be supplied to both the Pakrut processing plant and the smelting plant in Vahdat.
Trial mining started in October, and by the end of 2015 the company had mined 98,445 tonnes of ore and the stockpile stood over 160,000 tonnes at year end. The trial produced a total of 2.45 kilogrammes of gold - equal to around 88 ounces.
Since the end of the year, the company has secured a USD120.0 million loan facility that is repayable at the end of 2018, which will allow the company to continue advancing the project. China Nonferrous Gold is also in discussions to refinance its 2012 loan, it said.
"The transformation of the Pakrut gold project from construction to production is now almost complete and this remains the immediate focus of the management. Issues from trial mining have been resolved and the company is on course to reach nameplate capacity for phase one of the project of 2,000 tonnes per day during the fourth quarter of 2016. The plant is currently processing 1,300 tonnes of ore per day," said the company.
"During the course of the next 12 months the company plans to construct a permanent camp at site, replacing the temporary one currently in use and relocate the tailings dam. The current tailings dam was always expected to be temporary in nature and the company expects to complete the construction of a new permanent tailings dam in the first half of 2017. The current site has sufficient capacity until this time," it added.
China Nonferrous Gold shares were down 1.0% to 29.94 pence per share on Thursday.
By Joshua Warner; [email protected]; @JoshAlliance
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