A further update for LBE
Liberty Mines names Oishi, Zhang to board
2011-07-06 11:36 ET - News Release
Mr. Chris Stewart reports
LIBERTY ANNOUNCES CLOSING OF RESTRUCTURING TRANSACTIONS
Liberty Mines Inc.'s new five-member board will be made up of returning directors Wu Shu, John Pinsent and Dr. Tao Li, as well as newly elected directors Kim Oishi and Dr. Zhang Shu. Gil Bertrand did not stand for re-election. As a result of the restructuring of the board, Mr. Bertrand, Xu Guangping and Wang Xingrui have resigned as directors of Liberty. The company wishes to thank all of them for their contributions and dedication to Liberty during their tenure on the board.
Mr. Oishi has 17 years of experience in capital markets and investor relations for public companies, serving as an officer or director of a number of Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX-V-listed companies. Since 2004, he has focused on companies with investors and operations in China. Mr. Oishi will strengthen the board's ability to assist management to access capital markets and establish a best practices investor relations program.
A total of 2,315,000 incentive share purchase options have been granted to officers, directors and employees of Liberty to acquire shares at 10.5 cents per share for a period of three years with vesting periods varying from immediate to three years.
Production at Liberty's Timmins operations has been stopped since early February of this year due to concerns with the tailings pond facility (TPF). Since that time, a number of deficiencies have been addressed, including the construction of a new emergency spillway. Currently, a borehole drilling program is being conducted on the tailings dam itself to investigate the lithology of the dam walls. Engineering consultants from Klohn Crippen Berger (KCB) are overseeing all of the work currently happening within the TPF and the company is working closely with the regulatory agencies to ensure all of their concerns are addressed.
Chris Stewart, president and chief executive officer of Liberty, commented: "Since starting with Liberty on May 14 of this year, the majority of my time has been spent in Timmins working with our management team to review our current situation in order to develop a strategy for moving Liberty back into production as quickly as possible. At the same time, ongoing efforts are also being made to add resources to the company through exploration of our own properties as well as potential acquisitions or other opportunities as we look to grow Liberty beyond the Timmins camp.
"The main focus of our efforts at site has been on our tailings pond facility to first and foremost ensure that there are no potential safety concerns that could impact the environment. Once those concerns have been addressed, we will be working on what needs to be done to the existing TPF in order to provide tailings storage capacity to support our operating strategy for the next two to three years."
The Redstone mine and McWatters mine are currently in care and maintenance mode awaiting the restart of the Redstone mill. Given the current halt in production, the company is using this opportunity to refurbish the main components of the mill, including the jaw crusher, cone crusher and ball mills, so that when production restarts, the mill will be in top operating condition.
Work on the Hart deposit is continuing. The prefeasibility study for the Hart mine was awarded to Stantec on June 28, 2011, and will be handled out of the Sudbury and North Bay offices. This study is expected to be complete by October, 2011.
Mr. Stewart added: "We expect to be in a position to provide a more detailed update with respect to our tailings pond facility and our path back into production by the end of July. We understand that our shareholders want to know what is happening, but there is still much work to be done to determine what corrective measures must be taken, and this will take some time for us to complete."
We seek Safe Harbor.