Dear Alphastox Subscribers,
I’ve been getting a ton of inquiries over the last week since our last article on our next Zinc play to watch so I decided to feature the name a little earlier than expected. It’s a company I became a shareholder in and absolutely love their prospects. The ONE Zinc company that I feel has the potential to have an amazing run in 2017 is Kootenay Zinc Corp. (CSE:ZNK). This is a good of a shot as anything I’ve seen , and with the mining market picking up over the last little while, this is one company you can’t afford to miss.
Kootenay Zinc is now fully funded after closing an over-subscribed $3.3 million financing and is perfectly positioned to generate substantial shareholder value. The capital was raised to drill the company’s Sully Project, located just 30km away from the legendary Sullivan mine (owned and operated by Teck Resources and produced over 17 million tonnes of lead and zinc and 337 million ounces of silver from 150 million tonnes of feed. At current prices value of production was US $49 Billion). The Sullivan mine was a Sedex deposit, and what attracted me most to the project was the fact that ZNK’s team see similarities between the two projects.
According to ZNK’s website: “The same stratigraphic level that Sullivan was deposited at appears to coincide with the East gravity anomaly at Sully. A subtle lead-zinc soil anomaly possibly reflects leakage up faults and dispersion through thick till and alluvium from an entirely buried deposit.”
Initial surveying by the team indicated a shallow mass that was missed by drilling in 2004. In 2014, downhole temperature and magnetic field readings indicated the target may have been missed by 100m and new gravity data conducted by ZNK confirm and better define the location of a large East mass. With this new information, management intends to undertake a drill program to target this east mass which could be huge and lead us to the mother load…
Now, obviously after reading all this and going through the company’s website for more information on the project (which I highly encourage everyone to do here: https://www.kootenayzinc.com/), one couldn’t help but put ZNK on their radar screen and potentially take a shot at something that could become the next Sullivan mine, but what’s even more striking for this ~ $24 million market cap
exploration play is the team they have leading the charge; it’s the “Who’s Who of the mining industry.”
Don’t believe me? Take a look at their bio’s below and judge for yourself:
Peter Meredith
Mr. Meredith has been a director of Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (formerly, Ivanplats Limited) since May, 1998. Mr. Meredith is the former Deputy Chairman and Chief Financial Officer of Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (now Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd.), where he was involved in overseeing Ivanhoe Mines Ltd.’s business development and corporate relations. Mr. Meredith was member of the board of directors of Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. and also served as its Chief Financial Officer from June, 1999, to November, 2001 and from May, 2004, to May, 2006, and as its Deputy Chairman from May 2006 to April 2012. Mr. Meredith was also Chairman of South Gobi Resources Ltd. until September, 2012.
Jonathan Rubenstein
Mr. Rubenstein is the chairman of Mag Silver Corp., a director of Detour Gold Corp. and a director of Eldorado Gold Corp. He is also Vice President, Corporate Secretary and a Director of Andagan Resource Corp. In 2001, Mr. Rubenstein was one of the founders of Canico Resources Corp., where he served as a Director, Vice President & Corporate Secretary as the company acquired, explored and developed its Onca Puma nickel deposit in Brazil. Mr. Rubenstein was instrumental in the negotiations for the 2005 acquisition of Canico by CVRD of Brazil for $941 million. As vice president, corporate affairs for Sutton Resources, he also played a key role in negotiating the $525 million takeover of that company by Barrick Gold Corp. in 1999.
Tookie Angus
Mr. Angus is an independent business advisor to the mining industry. Mr. Angus is the former chairman of the board of B.C. Sugar Refinery Ltd. He was a director of First Quantum Minerals until June, 2005, a director of Canico Resources Corp. until its takeover by CVRD in 2005, and a director of Bema Gold until its takeover by Kinross Gold in 2007. More recently, he was managing director of mergers and acquisitions for Endeavour Financial, a director of Ventana Gold until its takeover by AUX Canada Acquisition in 2011, and a director of Plutonic Power until its merger with Magma Energy in 2011. He is currently chairman of Nevsun Resources Ltd., which operates one of the highest-grade open-pit copper mines in the world. He is also the curent chairman of K92 Mining Inc.
PAUL RANSOM (P. GEO)
Mr. Ransom is a geologist and noted Sullivan SEDEX deposit expert, having worked for over 33 years with Cominco, now Teck Resources Limited. Much of his career was spent at Sullivan related to the regional geology. Mr. Ransom has authored and/or co-authored ten papers on geology of the Sullivan deposit. Mr. Ransom also spent 1.5 years as a project geologist under secondment to Mt. Isa Mines in Australia, another large- scale copper, lead, zinc and silver mine. Mr. Ransom managed drilling Sullivan Deeps and has worked extensively elsewhere in the Kootenay region of B.C. He has also worked in the Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Mr. Ransom’s passion for finding other mega-SEDEX deposits has been a career-long pursuit.
DR. DAVID BROUGHTON PhD GEO.
Dr. David Broughton joined Ivanhoe Mines in January 2008 and has overseen Ivanhoe Mines’ discovery of two major mineral deposits, Kamoa in the DRC and the Flatreef in South Africa.
Dr. Broughton is recognized as an expert in sediment-hosted copper deposits, and has been a key participant in several discoveries and successful development projects. (DRC), Namibia, China, United States, Canada and Poland. He was co-leader of the Kamoa discovery team that is the 2015 recipient of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada’s (PDAC) prestigious Thayer Lindsley Award. This award, honouring the memory of one of Canada’s greatest mine finders, recognizes an individual or a team of explorationists credited with a recent significant mineral discovery.
BRIAN JONES P.GEOPHYS
Mr. Jones and Excel Geophysics are noted gravity experts and consultants, having completed notable large-scale surveys for mineral exploration and resource estimates, including the Voisey’s Bay Project. Inco Ltd. purchased Diamond Fields Resources Ltd. which owned the Voisey’s Bay Project for $4.3 billion.
I have yet to find a company with a similar market cap with a better team than this one…when I first looked at their roster, I pulled out my cheque book in an instant and begged for the subscription agreement. These guys have generated billions in shareholder value over the last decade, taking tiny exploration companies and turning them into mid-tier producers. There isn’t a better team qualified to find and develop early stage projects than this one and I can’t wait to see what they can do here.
Someone asked me a few days ago “why would these mining tycoons bother getting involved with a small exploration company like ZNK when they’re busy running billion dollar deposits?” The answer is simple: they want to put their name all over another massive discovery and they obviously felt like ZNK’s Sully Project had that chance. Make no mistake, they didn’t need to get involved with ZNK, or any company for that matter, but they did, because of the opportunity they saw. It’s obviously a long shot, and at the end of the day, our fate lies in the drill bit, but if they hit, early speculative investors with a high enough risk tolerance will be heavily rewarded.
The team is just starting to get the word out before they start their drill program. I am long the stock and will continue to provide coverage for subscribers throughout their drill campaign so stay tuned. This is a name you don’t want to miss.
Disclosure: Transcend Capital Inc. is a shareholder of Kootenay Zinc and has been paid a fee