And then there was one....
WITS Gold is eager to get going at the Burnstone mine, which sucked up $800m of Great Basin Gold’s cash before the company went under. Wits CEO Philip Kotze says all the company’s attention is now on concluding the transaction of buying the mine from liquidators, and it is not in the running for AngloGold Ashanti’s Navachab mine in Namibia.
Shifting from looking for gold to actually mining the metal at a mine that led to the demise of its former owner will be a major adjustment.
Wits will have to deal with complex geology and must complete surface and underground infrastructure and implement a completely new mine plan, with the accompanying need for underground development. Kotze says this programme of work will take a year.
Great Basin was run by Ferdi Dippenaar, right-hand man of Bernard Swanepoel, the brains behind the rise of Harmony Gold from owning a single mine to being one of the world’s top five producers.
Kotze also cut his teeth at Harmony. He later took on the fraught CEO position at Anooraq Resources, a struggling platinum producer, but didn’t exactly shine.
At this time, when investors are deeply sceptical about gold companies, let alone those trying to restart a failed project, the going will be extremely tough for Wits. This could be seen as a battle between two Harmony Gold old boys, and investors will be watching to see that Mr Kotze doesn’t come a cropper on the same slippery slope as Mr Dippenaar.