Bezant raises £0.63m for Hope and Kalengwa projects

The AIM-traded firm said the fundraising comprised a conditional placing of 750,000,000 new ordinary shares for £0.6m at a price of 0.08p each, and a subscription by its executive chairman Colin Bird, who invested £25,000 to subscribe for 31,250,000 new shares at the placing price representing 4.17% of the total amount.

It said the net proceeds would be used in relation to reconnaissance drilling at the Hope Copper-Gold project, focussed on assessing the gold potential at Gorob-Vendome Deposit where most of the historic drill programmes in the late 1970's and early 1980's were not assayed for gold, so positive results would potentially increase the attractiveness of the Hope Copper-Gold project.

They would also be used at the Kalengwa project in Zambia, to test one or more of the identified promising anomalies, as well as for the group's general working capital purposes.

“The commencement of reconnaissance drilling at both the Hope Copper-Gold Project and the Kalengwa project will enable us to further develop our understanding of these two significant projects in a positive market for gold and copper,” said Colin Bird.

“At the Gorob-Vendome Deposit, rock chip results have returned gold grades of 0.1 to 6.8 grams of gold per tonne in association with a copper mineralisation.”

Bird said those rockchip results showed that there was gold associated with the copper minimisation within the Gorob-Vendome Deposit, similar to that found within the Hope Deposit, and thus it was interpreted that the gold grade of the current JORC mineral resource of 10.2 million tonnes at 1.9% copper and 0.3 grams of gold per tonne at 0.7% copper was a “significant” underestimate.

“At Kalengwa the anomalies are within 2-4Km of the historic Kalengwa mine and an untested 13 kilometre-long copper soil anomaly aligned with the major structure.”

At 1051 BST, shares in Bezant Resources were down 7.33% at 0.097p.