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Phosphate and nickel plays: Tim Treadgold finds more manure than real phosphate out there
In the world of phosphate, soaring prices for fertiliser has sparked a rush across the country, triggering the release of drilling data from booms past – and earning a belated set of warnings from stockmarket regulators that everything old is not necessarily worth what it seems.
Two high-profile phosphate hunters, Minemakers and Golden Cross Resources, have been forced by the Australian Securities Exchange to retract reports quoting old exploration data because it fails to comply with reporting code of the Joint Ore Reserves Committee (the so-called JORC-code).
In a re-run of the early stages of the uranium boom of three years ago the phosphate explorers have been so keen to tell the world that they have their foot on an old discovery that they appear to have forgotten that the reporting rules have changed.
It’s a sobering suggestion, but if anyone can bothered to look back at those early uranium reports most of the companies involved have seen their share prices crash.Last week (June 10), Minemakers was forced by the ASX to issue a correction about the classification of resources at its Wonarah project. In nutshell, the data used was old, and although there is no doubting the presence of a large resource of phosphate, it is not technically up to modern JORC-code standards. Minemakers lodged a 39-page report explaining its position, including a geological report from 1970 backing up its argument.
On the day of the correction, the Minemakers share price slumped from $1.95 to $1.72. It is now back to $2.02, still well short of the all-time high of $2.95 reached on April 18.
Golden Cross found itself in similar hot water to Minemakers, issuing a formal retraction to “all quoted tonnages and grades of rock phosphate” at the joint venture Mt Isa area it is exploring with the US-based Legend International, a company closely associated with Melbourne company director Joseph Gutnick.
The first report on the Mt Isa project was lodged late last year, but the formal retraction which followed a stock exchange query, was only made on May 30.
Golden Cross and Legend plan to start re-drilling their tenements soon.