Kalahari Minerals announced that it has received 97.61% of the acceptances from Coronet Resources shareholders in favor of the conditional off market takeover. Coronet’s principal asset is a 7.65% stake in Kalahari.
The AIM listed company initially tabled the share based bid in December, offering 1 Kalahari share for every 1.705 Coronet share held. Upon completion, Coronet’s holding could either be placed with new investors, or cancelled to boost the NAV per share.
At the time the bid was announced, on December 17, the share based offer valued Coronet at AUSD 50.4 million or AUD 1.85 per share. Having received acceptances greater than 90%, a key condition of the offer, Kalahari now expects the transaction to close on March 3rd 2010, subject to certain other conditions. According to Kalahari, current Coronet shareholders will benefit from the access to Kalahari’s liquidity as an AIM and Namibian Stock Exchange listed company.
Kalahari said that among the terms of the deal Coronet is required to dispose of its Western Australian mining tenements, resulting in Coronet not having any material assets other than the 16 million Kalahari shares.
In recent statement Kalahari noted that Coronet has lodged surrenders of the tenements with Western Australia’s Department of Mines and Petroleum. Provided the surrenders were lodged in the prescribed manner registration of the surrenders will be deemed to have occurred at the time of lodgement.
Kalahari’s primary asset is its 40% owned Extract Resources which in turn owns and operates the Rossing South uranium deposit on the Husab project, Namibia. Where the resource currently stands at 292 million lb graded 439 ppm U3O8 of which 267 million lb at grade of 487 ppm on zones 1 and 2.
At Rossing South, the ongoing exploration work continues to return high grade intercepts. Most recently on January 11th 2010 Extract reported exploration results which included high grade intercepts from infill drilling and encouraging” results from a RadonX survey program. Which the companies said confirmed the world class nature of the resource and its future production potential.
Results from the chemical assay included intersections of 113 meters graded at 382 parts per million of U3O8, 95 meters at 665 ppm U3O8, 24 meters at 2349 ppm U3O8, 50 meters at 1,618 ppm U3O8, 91 meters at 854 ppm U3O8, 65 meters at 1,125 ppm U3O8, 38 meters at 1,699 ppm U3O8, 75 meters at 770 ppm U3O8, 23 meters at 2,417 ppm U3O8, 3 meters at 11,034 ppm U3O8 and 33 meters at 1,487 ppm U3O8.
Extract said that it expects to add substantial resources to existing inventories within the next six months and beyond. The project’s feasibility study is currently underway and Extract believes it has enough cash resources to fund a new exploration program.
Kalahari also owns 44.9% of North River Resources which acquired Kalahari’s copper and zinc interests through an asset swap deal in November. Also at the end of 2009, North River raised EUR 7 million in an oversubscribed fundraising. The proceeds are being used to advance the newly acquired copper interests including the Koperberg Project which currently hosts a JORC interred resource of 1.74 million tonnes grading 0.9% copper and the RK and RK West Projects which host additional non JORC resources of 0.55 million tonnes at 1.25% copper and 0.77 million tonnes at 0.9% copper respectively.
