SSC to spend R250m bringing Barbrook mines out of business rescue

Lily Mine disaster

THE privately-held Siyakhula Sonke Empowerment Corporation (SSC), a predominantly mining services and contracting company, unveiled its first of several direct investments in the sector saying it would need R250m to buy the Barbrook gold mines.

These are the operations in Mpumalanga province where the Lily mine disaster occurred in which three miners were trapped in a collapsed lamp room in February 2016. The bodies of the three miners were not recovered. Lily mine is part of the Barbrook complex.

Fred Arendse, founder of SSC, said the intention was to recover the miner’s remains as part of a wide-ranging re-capitalisation of the mining area. He said the company viewed the current proposal as the first in a number of other gold mining investments.

The anticipated working capital required to operationalise the mines in the complex and associated infrastructure is about R46.2m, he said. The R250m is the cost of bringing the operations out of business rescue through takeover of current owner Vantage Goldfields Operations. Thereafter, SSC would embark on a recommissioning process starting with the metallurgical plant and by appointing a contractor to develop the new Lily Mine Access – a task Arendse hoped to complete by the year-end.