[miningmx.com] – VILLAGE Main Reef (VMR) has appointed Ferdi Dippenaar as CEO of the company following the resignation of Bernard Swanepoel who is to become non-executive chairman of the company.
The change in roles is part of a management shake-up in which the firm’s CFO, Sandeep Gandhi and human resources director, Richard de Villiers have also resigned. Marius Saaiman, current MD of VMR’s platinum operations, will be interim CFO.
Shares in VMR responded immediately gaining 15%.
Swanepoel replaces current VMR chairman, Roy Pitchford.
“The resignations of the three directors were tendered in support of Village’s objective of having an appropriately sized and configured board of directors and is aligned with the re-organisation taking place throughout the company,” the company said in an announcement to the JSE today.
“I would like to thank all the members of the Village board for their various contributions during the past three years,” said Swanepoel. He also acknowledged the role played by Pitchford during the founding years of Village’.
The management shake-up follows a difficult year for VMR to date in which its share price fell back to a low of 37 cents per share. The company had in January bought back shares for an average price of R1.20/share – an R80m loss.
The company also closed two of its gold mines – Buffelsfontein (Buffels) and Blyvooruitzicht (Blyvoor) – and will be anxious nothing goes awry at its two surviving assets, Tau Lekoa, a gold mine near Orkney in the North West province, and Consolidated Murchison (Cons Murch), which produces antimony and gold.
The resignation of Swanepoel from executive duties brings the curtain down on his much-vaunted ‘return’ after leaving Harmony Gold in 2007, a company he built with long-standing colleague, Dippenaar.
For his part, Dippenaar was previously CEO of Great Basin Gold, a company now in business rescue proceedings following the failure of its South African gold project, Burnstone, to meet production targets.
“If we do nothing but hunker down for the year that will be good,’ Swanepoel told Finweek last week. “We need to come out of an unexpected negative performance,’ he added.
