LONDON (Alliance News) - Jubilee Platinum PLC Monday said the processing plant at the Dilokong chrome mine in South Africa has been fully commissioned and is now operating at 85% of its design capacity, and said operations are continuing as usual despite its partner suffering financial difficulties.
The company has developed the processing plant at the mine, which is now operational, under its agreement with ASA Metals (Pty) Ltd to recover platinum group metals from the ASA-owned mine.
The plant has a design capacity of 25,000 tonnes a month, and the plant is now running at a throughput rate of 21,000 tonnes a month. Jubilee said the ramp-up suffered some minor delays "beyond the control" of the company due to events related to ASA Metals, but these have now been resolved satisfactorily, Jubilee said.
In addition, Jubilee said it wanted to clarify the status of ASA Metals, which is currently undergoing a business rescue process in an attempt to return the company to profit from its current financial state.
"Whilst the company cannot comment in detail regarding the business rescue process the company has been assured at high level that its operations will remain unaffected and wishes to confirm that the project continues to have access to surface stock material at Dilokong and business will continue as normal," said Jubilee.
"The company will continue to update shareholders and remains focussed in reaching full operational output during March 2016 while simultaneously advancing the construction of the significantly larger platinum and chrome surface processing project at the Hernic operations targeting a combined processing capacity of 80,000 tonnes of feed material per month," Jubilee added.
The processing project at Hernic is being constructed under a separate deal with Hernic Ferrochrome Pty Ltd.
Jubilee shares were up 9.9% to 3.60 pence per share on Monday.
By Joshua Warner; joshuawarner@alliancenews.com; @JoshAlliance
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Jubilee Metals (JLP)