Premier African Minerals gets £1.25M for Zulu project
Premier African Minerals, a London-listed company, has raised £1.25 million for its Zulu lithium and tantalum project in Zimbabwe.
Patricia Rwafa
The funds will be used for ongoing mining operations and working capital. The company is also addressing technical challenges in its processing plant.
Premier raised £1,25m at 0.16p per share to fund the optimisation of the Zulu plant which has been dogged by delays and questions about the grade of its offtake.
Premier in March replaced the original contractor at the Zulu plant and says that, while the flotation circuit is now capable of running in a constant and stable state, it will take time to fully remedy the original design deficiencies in the overall plant and move from what, in many instances, are interim fixes to the final operating.
Contractors at Zulu have agreed to accept payment of 2 million dollars of invoices, in new ordinary shares of the company.
Accordingly, the company on 21 May settled a payment of US $2milion (equivalent to £1.57 million)in invoices through the issue of 983,500,000 new ordinary shares of the company at the price of 0.16 pence per order share.
The company is optimistic about the mining operations and ore grades expecting quarterly production reports starting from Q3 2024 and is actively resolving technical challenges in its floatation circuit and ore sorting processes.
According to George Roach, CEO,
“The Company provided a full discussion on the Zulu plant performance in our announcement of 8 May 2024.
The Company expects that periodic updates will be provided on the overall plant performance until a steady state of continuance production has been achieved, Premier expects thereafter to begin providing quarterly production reports for Zulu from Q3 of 2024.
Over and above this, we are encouraged with mining operations and the ROM ore grades that consistently exceed our resource estimate and this is mitigating for the moment, the ore sorter deficiencies.
This also supports the review of overall operations and production costs and the likely reduced production costs discussed below.
Inspections required as a prelude to export have commenced, and this precedes any export. We do not expect any delays regarding the export permits required.
This was confirmed in recent meetings with the Government of Zimbabwe when the issue of RHA Tungsten Private Limited (“RHA”) was also discussed and we are encouraged that there is now a likely resolution to this issue. The rising price of Tungsten is noted“.