IGL looks to the copper ‘monster’

PERTH junior explorer International Goldfields Limited is looking forward to the end of the financial year as its five-year-old deal with BHP Billiton over a large copper anomaly in Romania comes to a close.

The cashed-up junior has been very active since listing on the ASX in 2001, spinning off a multitude of non-core company assets into new companies, including Jackson Gold, Republic Gold, Cazaly Resources, Polaris and Great Australian Resources.

Along the way, IGL has merged with local associate company, Hamill Resources Limited, and maintained three core assets including the Sacu project watching its share price rise from 20 cents at listing to 32.5 cents earlier this week.

First gold is expected later in the year from IGL’s Mt Ida project west of Leonora, but IGL managing director Tony Sage said the real excitement would begin in September when drilling started on the “monster” Sacu copper anomaly.

Sacu lies 30 kilometres south of the well-known Golden Quadrilateral geological region of Romania.

At the end of June a 75 per cent claw-back arrangement BHP has held on Sacu since assembling the project in the early 1990s will expire, and Mr Sage said IGL would begin an eight-hole, $1 million drilling campaign.

BHP has already done significant aeromagnetic work developing the targets at Sacu and IGL recently announced “very encouraging” IP (Induced Potential) results thought to represent a large porphyry intrusive body capable of hosting significant copper-gold mineralisation.

IGL paid $1.5 million for the Sacu project in 1999, and despite spending $3 million maintaining the tenements, no value is assigned to the project in IGL’s portfolio.

“No one’s drilled it, that’s the beauty about it, it’s absolutely fresh,” Mr Sage said. “We have not drilled it because we did not want BHP to get the claw-back. But if it is as big as what BHP thought it was in drafting the claw-back arrangement, we will need a big, big partner to develop it. ”