Artemis Resources is selling its shares in Canadian joint venture partner Novo Resources — which could fetch the Pilbara explorer a tidy $C22.1 million if the shares are sold at market value.

Artemis (ASX:ARV) went into a trading halt this morning ahead of a deal to sell its 4 million shares in the TSX Venture Exchange-listed company.

Novo’s share price closed at $C5.52 on the TSX-V Tuesday.

But Artemis isn’t short of cash, with roughly $17.4 million cash in the kitty and no debt at the end of the last quarter.

Artemis and Novo are partners in the Purdy’s Reward project south of Karratha in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

Artemis’ share price has come down quite a bit from the peak of 59c it hit mid-November last year, closing at 19c on Tuesday.

The pair kicked off a bit of a gold rush in the Pilbara region mid-last year after they revealed they had found gold nuggets that were eventually confirmed as conglomerate-hosted gold.

Conglomerate gold refers to nuggets hosted in rock featuring rounded gray quartz pebbles and other minerals. The world’s most productive gold region, South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin, is famous for its conglomerate geological formation.

But the nuggety gold in the Pilbara is proving somewhat difficult to drill and the joint venture partners have had to undertake bulk sampling instead.

Artemis is also more focused on nickel these days and building up its war chest at its Radio Hill operations.

“When it comes to our conglomerate play I am letting our Canadian joint venture partner Novo Resources take the running of that,” chairman David Lenigas told Stockhead in April.

The company declined to comment until it has emerged from the trading halt, which is expected to happen by Friday.

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