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GEM confirms LSE listing plan Posted: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 [miningmx.com] -- GEM Diamonds (Gem), the company that owns the Letseng diamond mine in Lesotho, confirmed it would list on the London Stock Exchange's (LSE's) main board after completing an offer to institutional shareholders in February. Fund raised will be pumped into projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR), CEO Clifford Elphick said in an interview. Miningmx reported on December 13 that Gem was considering switching its London listing from the LSE's main board from the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) where it first intended to list. Details of how much capital Gem hopes to raise in the global offer remains under wraps until the release of a prospectus on 2 February, Elphick said. By the end of this year, Gem will add up to 75,000 carats per quarter of production from an alluvial project in the DRC, and a further 20,000 carats per quarter from an alluvial project in the CAR. This will add to the 100,000 carats from its Letseng kimberlite project in Lesotho. Conditional trading on the LSE will start on 15 or 16 of February. Gem, which was founded by Elphick in July 2005, had originally proposed a listing on London’s AIM. “As a start up company I had assumed that we wouldn’t get a main board listing but the acquisition of Letseng with its three-year track record got us over that hurdle,” Elphick said. “Another reason is that AIM had started to look a bit soft and there started to be a bit of investors sniffiness about AIM,” he said. Gem is looking for further acquisitions during 2007, he said, without giving details. “We’ve got a nice pipeline of potential transactions. We want to grow by organic growth and acquisitions. We are looking at a number of things,” he said. “If we didn’t do something in 2007 I would be quite disappointed.” Gem has four development projects in the DRC where ownership ranges from 50% to 100%. Once a project has a mining licence, the government takes a 5% free carry. A processing plant is being shipped to the DRC project at Chikapa west of Mbujimayi in the south west of the country. And earthmoving equipment is already on site. “We hope to be in a position to produce 50,000 to 75,000 carats a quarter by the end of the year,” said Elphick, who is the former manager of E Oppenheimer and Son, the 40% owners of De Beers. It has one development project in the CAR, where it owns 75% of the project and the government holds 25%. A bulk sampling plant will be commissioned at the CAR project in March this year. “From the beginning of next year we should be seeing about 20,000 carats a quarter,” Elphick said. Gem is spending $45m at Letseng to double output from 54,000 carats a year by the second quarter of next year. Letseng’s capacity will grow to 430,000 tonnes/month, giving it a 35-year life. Click Here to subscribe to our daily newsletter
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