Gold: Rich-lister Wallin jumps on Venus Metals register as Youanmi runs red hot

It’s been a wild ride for a gold hopefuls in the Younami region of WA, driven by the success that Spectrum Metals is having at its high grade, brownfields Penny West project.

Over the last month Spectrum (ASX:SPX) is up 226 per cent. Neighbouring explorers Venus Metals (ASX:VMS) and Rox Resources (ASX: RXL) are also up 68 per cent and 64 per cent, respectively, over the same period.

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Now Venus has received an application from a guy called Christopher Wallin for a $1.2m private placement of 6 million shares at 20c each.

The placement would make Wallin a substantial shareholder with voting power of about 5.03 per cent.

But who’s Christopher Wallin?

Wallin is the #41 richest person is Australia (according to Forbes) with an estimated net wealth of about $910 million. He made his money through private company QCoal Group, which has developed a number of coal mines in Queensland’s Bowen Basin.

A pretty handy person to have in your corner.

READ: The Explorers — Venus Metals’ Matt Hogan on hot tips from Mark Creasy and ‘blue sky’ potential at Youanmi

In other gold news today:

What does Resolute Mining’s (ASX:RSG) big $400m takeover of private miner Toro Gold mean for Toro exploration JV partner Predictive Discovery (ASX:PDI)? Predictive boss Paul Roberts told Stockhead he is expecting “business as usual”.

“But we haven’t spoken [with Resolute] yet – hoping to do so in the next few days,” he says.

There’s now about 1.25km of gold mineralisation between the Myhree and Boundary deposits at the Bulong project, Black Cat Syndicate (ASX:BC8) says. And deeper drilling has returned hits like 16m at 2.18g/t gold from 159m at Boundary, which will be incorporated in the upcoming resource update.

“The extensions at Boundary provide encouragement of a larger scale system at depth,” Black Cat’s Garth Solly says. “Mineralisation remains open in all directions and has the potential for additional high-grade zones, similar to Myhree.”

King of the Hills (KOTH) could be WA’s “next significant gold mine”, producer Red 5 (ASX:RED) says. A new pre-feasibility study (PFS) concludes that an initial 10-year, 140,000oz per annum open pit operation would cost about $218m to build. It would also produce at an average all in sustaining cost of $1167/oz, which is pretty good.

“We are confident the project will continue to enjoy growth in both resources and reserves over the next 12 months and we are focused on advancing the KOTH project towards development over the next 18 months,” Red 5’s Mark Williams says. “In parallel with the continued successful operation and growth of our Darlot operations, King of the Hills has the potential to quickly elevate Red 5 in the ranks of Australia’s mid-tier gold producers.”

The Final Feasibility study is scheduled for completion by mid-2020.