Investors in Barkerville Gold Mines Ltd. (TSX: V.BGM, Stock Forum) were left stranded on August 15, when the company was hit with a cease trading order by both the British Columbia Securities Commission and the TSX Venture Exchange.
Shares of the company are expected to remain suspended until the company files a technical report to support the junior’s recent disclosure of a change in mineral resources in the Cow Mountain area of its Cariboo gold property in central British Columbia.
However, Barkerville shareholders had more consider on Friday after the Northern Miner newspaper took a look at its database and found that Barker’s predecessor International Wayside Gold Mines and its President and Chief Executive Officer Frank Callaghan had experienced similar problems back in 2000.
As the Miner reported in its May 22, 2000 edition, International Wayside was slapped with a cease trading order 11 days earlier after the stock jumped from 61 cents to $2.04 in one day.
At that time, TSX Venture Exchange surveillance officials gave no explanation for the trading halt, which followed the discovery of a previously unrecognized style of bonanza gold mineralization on the Cariboo property. International Wayside changed its name to Barkerville in January 2010.
Callaghan told the Vancouver Sun that the exchange wanted independent verification of the company’s resource calculation of one million ounces in an open pit target covering parts of the historic Cariboo Gold Quartz mine on the flank of an area called Cow Mountain.
As reported by the Miner or June 12, 2000, an independent evaluation of a potential bulk-tonnage target in the Cow Mountain area not only concluded that the mineral inventory is about half as large a previously reported by International Wayside, it also raised questions about the validity of using data from surface and underground percussion drilling, a less-than-reliable sampling technique for gold deposits, according to the Miner report.
As subsequently reported by Stockhouse on August 15, 2012, Barkerville issued a news release on June 29, 2012 stating that Geoex Ltd. had been retained to complete an independent estimate of the mineral resources and geological potential at the Cariboo property, which is located in B.C.’s historic Barkerville mining district.
It estimated that an area encompassing about 10% of its Cariboo project hosted a NI-43-101 compliant geological potential of 65-90 million ounces of gold. The report by Geoex Ltd. said Cow Mountain has the potential to contain between 8 million and 13 million ounces of gold, material that would potentially be accessible by underground and open pit mining methods.
Prior to the most recent cease trading order, Barkerville shares were priced at $1.22, leaving the company with a market cap of $132.9 million, based on 109 million shares outstanding. The 52-week range is $1.78 and 31 cents.