Over the past 2 weeks there have been some interesting announcements from Meeka Metals which have peaked my interest:

1. Board Appointment:

The most recent was a non-price sensitive announcement confirming the appointment of Dan Lougher as a Non-Executive Director. Dan is a 40 year industry veteran who has been CE/MD for two companies (St Barbara and Western Areas Limited) over the past 15 years. The addition of an additional board member is complementary to their pursuits to become a bigger company, and his experience and knowledge will be valuable in the new Mount Holland pursuits (more comments below). Dan's appointment bolsters the mine engineering experience on the board, and also adds a degree of independence in the leadership team outside of the former Silver Lake Resources contingent.

2. Mount Holland South Acquisition

On 25 April, Meeka announces that it has entered an agreement to acquire the Mt Holland South gold tenements from M H Gold and Montague Resources. The purchase price was for $10 upfront, $10m paid three months after transaction completion, and 117.8m shares (circa $15m) for 71km² of mining tenements. The acquisition will be funded from existing cash reserves, and provides another growth opportunity outside of the Murchison Gold Project. The site is in very close proximity to the airport, has access to services, sealed main roads and other established infrastructure.

While the tenements are nowhere near the existing mining operations, the Pre JORC drilling results at Blue Vein and Bushpig are quite good at surface value (see image below) with a large number of intercepts <100m depth, coupled with some even better results as they started to drill at depth 150-450m. No modern exploration has been undertaken on these tenements over the past 15 years.

The company will be spending the next 3-6 months undertaking 20,000m of drilling to convert this into a JORC standard resource, and verifying the previous results. I will be good to see it all visually once they have undertaken their assessment.

There are some constraints around the site, with the site subject to a $25/oz royalty on any gold produced, and a new mining lease area will be granted (potentially over the lighter blue locations). The site is subject to a Lithium Rights agreement (which provides third parties the right to access the Tenements to explore and mine for lithium) which is likely for the benefit of Covalent Lithium who purchased the old Bounty mine sites and the gold prospect sites in the light blue.

Interestingly, the Mount Holland tenements are just down the road from the Lady Ada project from Classic minerals (ASX.CLZ) who had previously done a study on a 250-500ktpa processing mill, and are now in the process of working with Bain Global Resources to significantly expand the existing 80kt gekko processing facility at Goldbridge up to 1MPTA, to start processing the gold from the Kat Gap project which was sold by CLZ to Bain for $7m to stay solvent.

Classic are on the long term suspended companies list, and have appointed an advisor to try and get them reinstated on the market. Will be interesting to see what opportunity this brings to the Mount Holland Project.