Modern Mining January 2018

GOLD

a partnership with La Mancha Holding, a privately-held gold investment company controlled by the Sawiris Family, headed by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris. In terms of the transaction and putting it in its simplest terms, Endeavour acquired La Mancha’s indi- rectly held 55 % interest in Ity with La Mancha in return becoming a 30 % stakeholder in Endeavour. La Mancha also contributed US$63 million in cash to Endeavour. Since this initial investment, La Mancha has injected a fur- ther US$200 million to support Endeavour’s growth. Sébastien de Montessus, the then CEO of La Mancha, became President of Endeavour in late 2015 and CEO in mid-2016. Prior to the Endeavour transaction, La Mancha was already investigating a CIL opera- tion at Ity, completing a Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS) on a 2 Mt/a project. In November 2016 Endeavour announced the results of a positive Feasibility Study (FS) defining a 3 Mt/a CIL operation able to produce 165 koz/a over its first five years of operation. The company said at the time that the proj- ect had plenty of upside potential, given the ongoing exploration at Ity and the excellent results being achieved. This in fact proved to be the case and in late July 2017 Endeavour was able to announce that the indicated resource inventory for the CIL project had increased by 1,5 Moz (plus 65 %) compared to the inventory on which the 2016 FS was based. In view of this massive expansion of the resource base, Endeavour said it was work- ing on an Optimisation Study (OS) designed to

better capture the value created by the explo- ration success. The very robust results from the OS were published in September last year, with Endeavour Mining further increasing the plant size to 4 Mt/a and confirming at the same time that the project had entered the construction phase following board approval. The company said that its in-house construction team was being transitioned over from Houndé to Ity and that it expected a 20-month construction with the first gold pour taking place in mid-2019. Outlining the synergies with other Endeavour operations, Jeremy Langford, Endeavour’s COO,

Simplified layout of the Ity CIL project.

Plant area showing CIL ringbeams under construction.

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