At the same time, CFO Luciano Siani said that quickly restarting production was not the company's top priority after the Brumadinho disaster, for which the company was forced to take nearly $5 billion in writedowns in the first quarter.
Quebec-focused Monarch Gold is taking a 14.2% stake in Unigold, whose Nieta project in the Dominican Republic has an open-pit inferred resource of 39.49 million tonnes.
Foreign and local companies invested about $383 million exploring in Mexico in 2018, down 37.4% from the $612 million injected into the economy in 2017.