Denarius Silver Executive Chairman Serafino Iacono
Over the last three years he has built up Gran Colombia, so it now has $90 million cash at the end of 2020, is generating over US$100 million a year in operating cash flow, and he’s paying down debt and paying a monthly dividend.
But that quote Iacono gave me? It defines him. He’s made his fortune looking at natural resource plays with opportunity in his eyes and using everyone else’s dissatisfaction with an asset to swoop in and buy it cheap and…well, do what he does. He fixes things. He is like a home renovator.
His biggest renovation job was Pacific Rubiales, a heavy oil play in Colombia that he took from 10,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) to 300,000+ bopd in the 2000s.
“I've done a bunch of fixer uppers. I can tell you that with Pacific Rubiales, that growth we did was the same concession that everybody said that it couldn't be done because of the guerillas, because of security, because their API wouldn't flow, because, because, because…
“And when somebody tells me, "Because you cannot do it," that makes it all so interesting for me to try to do it.
“Same thing that we did with Choco 10 in Venezuela years ago. We took a mine that (the previous owner) could not develop. And a year and a half later, I put it in operation, and it was producing 200,000 ounces a year.
That concession, I bought it for $700,000 after they had spent $50 million on it. Why? They had illegal miners invading the property. They didn't know how to deal with it.”
“I picked up our company NGX Energy, a gas play in Colombia for not much more than $3 million market cap and we funded it and now we already have one discovery and a $150 million market cap, and more discoveries are coming and we’re going to keep growing the company.
“That’s what we do.”
It is a good thing that is what he does, because Iacono has a big project in Denarius Silver that needs some fixing—the Lomero-Poyatos mine in southern Spain. But if he can do it, it is a company maker for this junior explorer.
Lomero-Poyatos (LP) is a former producer, and is a VERY high grade polymetallic deposit in a known mining area—in fact one of the best mines in Europe is only a few kilometers away. On the surface, LP should be a cash cow for years and years.