RE:RE:RE:Gold moving higher again todayNo certainty re: impressive rise of GBR price prior to the takeover announcement by Kinross, but there are other possibilities to consider. Back in the 70s, Chestar Millar made his first mine discovery, the original Afton Mine. I got touted on the stock when it was still in the exploration stage, trading at 10 cents. I knew the secretary. Gotta admit that I did NOT buy though, lol.
A number of years later, the stock price was trading many, many multiples higher.
Then came an interval where the price steadily rose dramatically, eventually to over $17.
Later, the news came out that Teck Corp had been steadily buying on the open market, and was making a buy-out offer. That original mine produced for about a decade, and then was later re-birthed as "New Afton"
"The story begins with Chester Millar, who would go on to found Glamis Gold. Millar was a diamond driller in the late 1960s, but on days off would take his diamond drill beyond the highway near Kamloops and drill. He discovered the Afton deposit, which, as a mine, would define Dr. Keevil’s tenure at Teck.
“People thought it wasn’t economic because it was all native copper, not the chalcopyrite most Canadians were familiar with,” Keevil says. “The story in some parts of the business was that you can't mill native copper, ignoring that the first copper mines in North America were native copper. You can mill it.”
Dr. Keevil didn’t go out to find a copper deposit when he became aware of Afton, but he recognized its potential, along with his vice-president of mining Bob Hallbauer — whom Keevil had known in his days at Placer Development, and had managed to poach from the company.
Millar, however, rebuffed Keevil and Hallbauer’s overtures, saying he didn’t have the appetite to do the “ultimate” deal yet. Instead he advised the two to simply buy shares in the open market.
At the time Teck had a $30-million position in Mattagami Lake Mines. So Keevil and Hallbauer devised a strategy whereby they’d sell their non-controlling position in Mattagami and use the funds to gain a controlling position in Afton.
“I’ll never forget: Bob and I came back and tried to talk Dad into doing it,” Keevil says. “It was not an easy sell — he had just finally assembled all the outside shares in Mattagami, and Noranda had finally invited him on board. Before then he had no involvement at all. So he’s really happy about it, and then we come in and say: ‘We’ve got to sell it!’ It had all the earmarks of a non-starter.”
It took some convincing, but the senior Keevil finally bit the bullet. With that, Keevil Jr. and Hallbauer got to work, and in just three and a half days they bought 51% of the company — 45% of which was acquired in the open market.
“We went to see Chester again,” Keevil begins. “We said, ‘We have a fairly good position.’ He didn’t know it was us, but he knew something was up.”
While Afton would later bring in Placer as a tactic to dilute away Teck’s controlling position, Teck eventually bought Placer out, and in 1978, Afton went into production and became a key Teck asset. "