anyone care to guess at Waynes target price????? MINING NEWS 18th AUG
We're vindicated: CuDeco's McCrae
Paul Garvey
Friday, 18 August 2006
CUDECO executive chairman Wayne McCrae says he feels "completely vindicated" by recent results from the company's expanding Rocklands copper project in Queensland, saying the Australian Stock Exchange erred in compelling the company into a downward revision of the project's resource earlier this year.
Drilling at CuDeco's North Queensland copper projects
CuDeco yesterday announced its latest drilling at the project had extended the strike length of the mineralised zone to 950m, the same length extrapolated in the 59 million tonne resource the company was made to halve in July.
Speaking to MiningNews.net yesterday from the project in Queensland's Cloncurry region, McCrae said the latest results proved the ASX was wrong in suspending the company for 10 days in early July while the company reconsidered the resource calculation released on June 29.
"They [the ASX] have got to regulate the companies that trade on the stock exchange, I can understand that, I just think there could have been a better way for them to handle that," McCrae said.
"Number one is get on a plane come up here and have a look, instead of trying to do it out of an office in Sydney."
McCrae said he maintained that the original 59Mt resource that sparked the controversy was compliant under the JORC code.
"We complied with the JORC code, and the actual resource on June 29 was done by a competent person qualified under JORC. That's what we couldn't understand. The company didn't do it, an independent consultant did it," he said.
"We re-categorised it because the ASX wouldn't let us back on the market unless we did.
"The ASX wanted it re-categorised and that's what we did but that was done for them and not for us."
McCrae said yesterday's results justified the 950m strike length over which the company's consultants had originally extrapolated the resource, and added he thought the company would be "more than vindicated" by September.
"I want to reiterate that while the stock exchange got this one wrong, they get most of the other ones right. There's no animosity at all, and that's why we haven't worried about it. We knew we were going to get there [950m strike length]. Things just aren't 100m wide and peter out. They don't just stop.
"If the thing was 3m wide or 5m wide, you might have something to worry about, but we're consistently getting intersections of between 50m and 150m width, so we knew we were on to something majestic."
McCrae – who almost had both legs amputated several years ago after being involved in a helicopter accident – said he was unperturbed by the criticism directed towards himself and the company from certain sections of the media in the wake of the July resource revision.
"I discovered the Century zinc deposit, and copped exactly the same flak … so it was déjà vu to me, water off a duck's back, to tell you the truth.
"When you've got grey hair, when you've been in a helicopter crash that almost cut both your legs off, there's not really much anyone could do to hurt you."
McCrae also played down suggestions the metallurgy of Rocklands could make processing of the project's ore difficult, saying assaying of drill core suggested the ore had favourable metallurgy.
"We haven't done metallurgical test work, and nor do we need to at this stage, but it's a similar deposit and style of mineralisation to Ernest Henry, and when the laboratory do the assays they're actually telling us the metallurgy is really good," he said.
"The metallurgy is fairly simple, there's no arsenic or any of those things you don't want in an ore body like this. Basically you can base it on exactly what Ernest Henry's is."
CuDeco has had the benefit of using its own onsite laboratory that is maintained as part of the company's existing copper sulphate openpit operation, which has been operating at the project for three years.
McCrae confirmed CuDeco was in discussions with a number of parties interested in involvement in Rocklands, but ruled out the possibility of a joint venture over the asset.
"We're talking to a number of [interested parties] at this stage, we're going to retain 100% of it for as long as we can, and as far as joint ventures go, no there won't be a joint venture, but there might be an agreement with one group to do the mining and another group to do the processing, that more than likely will be one option. We'll own 100% of it or none of it, it'll be one of the two," he said.
"If we get taken out, then we get taken out, but as long as we get value for the shareholders, I don't really care."
McCrae, who owns just under 20% of CuDeco's issued capital, was reluctant to disclose a price tag for the project.
"I've got a price in mind, but if I tell you it'll be across all the papers tomorrow," he said.
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