London-listed investment company Papillon Holdings is making “good progress” towards completing the transaction agreement with Mayflower Capital Investments, which will result in the company acquiring some or all the interest of two gold assets located in Kenya and Congo-Brazzaville.
The company will also, upon completion, be renamed Gold Mines of Africa.
Among other things, Mayflower has confirmed that the technical and legal due diligence have been completed on these assets, with positive outcomes.
As a part of due diligence and testing the state of operations, the Kilimapesa mine, in Kenya, successfully restarted gold production. The first smelt took place on September 14, yielding an 87 oz gold bar.
Kilimapesa is an established gold mine with an existing 671 446 oz Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant resource and further resource expansion and mine optimisation potential.
Production at Kilimapesa, which Mayflower is acquiring from Goldplat, started in 2012 but the mine was put on care and maintenance last year, primarily owing to insufficient funding.
It has established infrastructure, including a 200 t/d processing plant that was commissioned in 2016.
Additional mine and process plant optimisation studies are under way and are to be implemented upon completion of the transaction to achieve gold production to current design capacity of 5 000 oz/y initially. This is expected to increase in stages to a run rate of 25 000 oz/y by the second quarter of 2022.
Papillon is in talks with Mayflower for a 70% interest in the Kakamoeka gold project, in Congo-Brazzaville.