Top Chinese gold producer Shandong Mining will have to arrange financing before unlocking its half of the Veladero mine in Argentina.
The precious metals miner said today it is seeking up to $1.26 billion in loans to fund the acquisition of a 50% stake in Barrick Gold’s operation.
Reuters reports the loans are being sought from two Chinese state-owned banks, with $960 million to be put towards the acquisition and the remaining $300 million as working capital.
In April Canada’s Barrick Gold (TSX, NYSE:ABX), the world’s No.1 producer of the precious metal by value, sold a 50% stake in Veladero to Shandong Gold Group in a transaction worth $960 million.
As part of the deal, the Shandong province-based gold miner will help Barrick move forward with the long delayed Pascua-Lama gold, silver and copper project, straddling the border between Chile and Argentina.
Both companies will also evaluate additional investment opportunities in the area, known as the El Indio Gold Belt.
State-owned Shandong Gold Group is China’s largest gold producer, both in terms of output and reserves.
In March Shandong said it discovered what is expected to be the largest gold mine in China, the Xiling gold mine in Shandong province. The company says the deposit has a deliverable gold resource of up to 550 tons after completion of exploration, according to a press release. That converts to 16.041 million troy ounces.
2 Comments
Plain Dealer
Huge deposits of gold are continually located in gold regions where other historical deposits have been previously discovered.. But if you listen to the so-called “experts” in the media, the human race is running out of natural resources (oil, gold, water, etc.). How can both of these points of view be true? The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there are hundreds of millions of ounces of gold still to be found in the lower 48 United States! Get the facts!: http://www.theessentialintroductionfornewgoldprospectors.com/
Pitchblende
It is all about return on energy invested. There will always be metals to mine and oil to pump, the question is how deep and how low grade. Once there was native copper and silver just laying around in a lot of places, and sweet oil reservoirs ten meters under ground. Not so any more.