BOKAMOSO Gold, a new private equity fund fronted by Billy Mawasha, former head of AngloGold Ashanti’s South African operations, is hoping to buy non-core gold mines from some of the country’s largest miners.
“If you look at the current owners — Sibanye-Stillwater, Harmony Gold, DRDGold, Pan African Resources all of them have assets in their portfolios which are not getting capital. Obviously we’re not going to target their flagship operations but [those] within the portfolios that are not attracting the best capital,” he said in an interview.
A maiden deal is imminent and others may follow, he said. The company is backed by Bernard Swanepoel, former CEO of Harmony Gold who knows a thing or two about M&A. Swanepoel took Harmony from a single 100,000 ounce a year, lease-bound gold mine to the world’s fifth largest. His long-standing colleague Clinton Halsey, formerly of DRDGold, is on the board along with Anton Taljaard, formerly of Nedbank CIB.
Mawasha said Bokamoso is talking to “mainstream bankers” for debt funding. “At the same time, we also started thinking about equity raises. We’ve been engaging with a few different family offices, different sources of potential equity partners. We’ll obviously put our own money in as well, and it will be on a case-by-case basis,” he said. Investec is advising.
This is where South African gold mining generally is — very little new mine activity, and more picking over the old resources. It’s even happening at Sibanye-Stillwater itself, which owns Driefontein and Kloof near Carletonville. Together, these mines produced more than one million ounces of gold a year only 10 years ago.
Richard Cox, COO of Sibanye-Stillwater’s South African operations, told the Joburg Indaba conference in October that the company doesn’t see great potential in mining deeper. Instead, it is looking at so-called secondary reefs, remnant gold that wasn’t worth as much as it is now.
“There is an old stope that had last been mined in the 1970s. That panel had stopped on uneconomic conditions at eight grams per ton. We’d love that,” he said. Sibanye-Stillwater produced gold at an average grade of 4.464g/t in its third quarter (though Driefontein mined about 7g/t while Kloof was about 4g/t).
The group is also looking at the reopening of Burnstone, a mine in Mpumalanga province that was previously the project of Great Basin Gold, a Canadian firm led by Swanepoel’s former commercial director at Harmony, Ferdi Dippenaar.
Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Richard Stewart told Miningmx there were no firm decisions yet on when it might be reopened. A partner was being sought. Given the ex-Harmony link to Burnstone, it seems like a job for Bokamoso.
