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I just can’t find anything he does [Ian Cockerill] wrong - Peter Major, Cadiz.
In an interview on Radio 2000 @ 18:00 on Friday, 9 September 2006
[miningmx.com] -- IAN Cockerill, Gold Fields CEO, came in for some high praise from Peter Major, a fund manager for Cadiz, who said Cockerill did not make mistakes, and was pragmatic.
"I think Ian’s one of the best mine managers out there. I’ve known the guy almost 20 years, and I just can’t find anything he does wrong. He’s always pragmatic, he always thinks things out," said Major. He was speaking on the Moneyweb Power Hour, a week nightly radio programme.
Major's comments follow an announcement last week by Gold Fields that it was to spend about R4.7bn deepening and extending its Driefontein and Kloof gold mines west of Johannesburg.
At the same time, however, the gold price has been volatile trading between $610 and $640/oz over the last two weeks. Major said the gold price volatility would not affect the value brought to Gold Fields by the two projects.
"They’ve
been sitting on this project, looking at it, for over 10 years and I think it was almost two years in the making that they did this announcement," said Major.
"No, it’s well thought out and they just wanted to make sure the gold price was going to be significantly above what it needed to give the go-ahead. And they’re doing it in bits, over 10 years," he said.
Major commented that it was no longer feasible to build very deep gold mining projects "from scratch". That was one of the reasons why it made sense for Gold Fields to extend its existing mines.
"What Ian is doing makes sense, because I don’t think there’s any money in the world any more for four-kilometre gold mines starting from scratch," said Major.
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