The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a weak 62-94-154 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose fractionally to 582. Leni Keough's Olivut Resources Ltd. (OLV) lost one-half cent to eight cents on 22,000 shares. The company has sold 7.46 million new shares at eight cents, raking in nearly $600,000 in new cash. Ms. Keough, the company's president and chief executive officer, helped the placement along by buying 625,000 new shares, giving her nearly 10 million now.
Perhaps offering more encouragement to the company's weary shareholders was word that stock promoter Pierre Lassonde bought 500,000 new shares, giving him nearly 8.6 million. Mr. Lassonde, who made his fortune -- and his name -- with gold years ago, has nevertheless been a fan of diamonds since the early days of Canada's diamond rush. His Franco-Nevada Mining Corp. Ltd -- not the current Franco, the old one that was absorbed by Newmont Corp. (NGT: $72.26) in the early 2000s -- became a significant shareholder of Aber Resources Ltd. and its Diavik project early on.
Franco then sold its interest at a hefty profit later, cementing Mr. Lassonde's enthusiasm for gems. He did not do so well a few years later, when Newmont spent nearly $200-million buying an interest in -- and briefly helping explore -- the Fort a la Corne diamond project in central Saskatchewan. Mr. Lassonde was gone when Newmont subsequently wrote off the investment, but he continued to lay personal bets on diamonds -- doing so by buying into Ms. Keough's Olivut.
By 2008, Mr. Lassonde had amassed several million shares of Olivut, enough to make him an insider. The buys came frequently thereafter, and through the early 2010s, Mr. Lassonde could often be counted on to segue a fawning interview from gold to Olivut and diamonds. Those mentions tapered off, and so did the buys. Mr. Lassonde did purchase over 570,000 shares at 17.5 cents in 2015, and his last buy was for 1.25 million shares at eight cents apiece three years ago. Therefore, this new purchase is an encouraging development to those retail shareholders who think that fellows like Mr. Lassonde have all the answers -- or at lease an inside track -- to market success.
Whether Olivut will find the one-in-a-hundred kimberlite success that Mr. Lassonde regularly predicted a decade ago is still unclear, although the pace of the company's drilling has tapered off to nearly nothing. Further, the company's focus has moved on from HOAM, well southwest of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, where its dozens of kimberlites yielded nothing more than a smattering of microdiamonds.
Now, Ms. Keough has diamonds -- perhaps more than Olivut ever found at HOAM -- but she is still looking for a kimberlite source. Those 20-odd diamonds came from small samples of beach sand collected at the Seahorse property, north of Great Bear Lake, on a property that the company shares with Dr. Ray Davies's Talmora Diamond Corp.(TAI: $0.06).
While Ms. Keough says only that the new cash is for exploration and general purposes, Seahorse is the likely destination. Olivut and Talmora just wrapped up a summer program at Seahorse, staking ground and sampling near the main target. The co-venturers collected a mini-bulk sample of the beach sand looking to recover more diamonds, perhaps more to prime the market than to point the way to a potential source. On that latter score, Ms. Keough and Dr. Davies did some general reconnaissance at Seahorse this summer to "aid future work program planning." And so, stay tuned for those diamond counts.