Interesting read9 Jun 2023 23:02
Leo plans to transport its spodumene along a 1000km transport route to the port of Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, where it has a deal to send a minimum of 250,000tpa over 10 years.
It is also lining up transport routes to diversify its political risk through San Pedro in Cote d’Ivoire or Dakar in Senegal, around 1600km from the mine, which is located 150km south of landlocked Mali’s capital Bamako.
“There are some other deposits to the east of us, which also outcrop and they’ve been discovered.
“But you can see a number of our pegmatites are not outcropping. So I think that’s a safe guess that there is more.
“We’re aware of a few parties exploring in Mali, but not many. And we expect to take over the next short while a regional exploration approach to West Africa. So we’re optimistic there’d be more.”
And while African mining investors may have had jitters seeing AVZ’s (ASX:AVZ) battle with China’s Zijin over the Manono lithium project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Hay says there are no concerns over its tenure in Mali, where a resource upgrade is due by the middle of the year and reserve update expected around August.
“We have the mining concession 30-year tenure, granted in 2019, and it was a single entity so it wasn’t partly owned. There’s no dispute, it was transferred from Firefinch to Leo in the demerger and that had the Prime Minister’s signature on that transfer. So for us I don’t worry about tenure,” Hay said.
“That is secure, and we’ve got Ganfeng who’ve paid for their share of the JV and we’re working together quite harmoniously.
“The risks are totally different and the other thing with Mali and the gold mining industry, they have a very long history of the rule of law.
“Mark Bristow said that last week at Indaba, they’re comfortable operating in Mali, Clive Johnson from B2Gold, they’re investing another US$400 million in Mali themselves.
“I think what the majors are doing in Mali shows that there’s confidence and stability, albeit security being a challenge.”
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