Shield Mining Limited

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David Netherway, Chairman of Shield Mining Limited, an ASX listed, Africa-based gold and precious metals explorer, has seen and done a great deal in his time.

He has worked in Ghana for Ghana National Manganese, headed-up Australian-listed Golden Shamrock with whom he set up the Siguiri Gold mines also in Ghana, created his own company Prospects Mining; a Vancouver Junior which he later sold to Semafo, built the Kiniero Gold mine in Guinea with Semafo, taken on Afcan Mining and started the Tanjianshan project in China, seen through the deal in which Eldorado Mining took over Afcan in 2005, then started Shield Mining in 2006.
IRJ spoke with Netherway about Shield Mining’s exciting new drilling campaign and the breaking news in his other companies too.

Shield Mining: History
“Shield is a spin-out from Sphere Investments who hold the major iron ore license and have a bankable feasibility study on an iron project in Mauritania. They really wanted to concentrate on the iron ore at that time and decided to spin-out their other assets which were gold and base metal holdings licenses in Mauritania. So we put them into an Australian vehicle and listed them on the Australian stock exchange and I took that on as CEO” Netherway explains.

“We had about four million dollars in the bank at that stage so we started exploring. We’re way up the north of Mauritania and it’s very difficult exploration; three days drive across the desert to get there, fly camping, not easy. So we did that for about two years then decided after about 18 months that this wasn’t going to make it. There was gold in the system but it just wasn’t sufficient to make an economic resource. Luckily we were then granted two licenses which we had applied for a couple of years before that and they were the Tijirit license and the Akjoujt license.”

The Tijirit mine is the prospective of these licenses and Shield went to work on that first.

“It’s 35 KM from the Tasiast gold mine which is owned by Red Back Mining Mining and that’s producing 230 ounces of gold a year at the moment. With our work there over the last 15 months or so we’ve proved that there is gold in the system. We do have a Tasiast lookalike and we’re very excited” Netherway says.

“So based on a small drilling program of 3,000 metres which we did in April we’ve done a rights issue in June/July which we closed earlier this month, very successfully oversubscribed and we raised $2.5 million Australian dollars so that we can go forward and do the next drilling program on this project.”

Shield also has a small copper deposit in the southern region of Mauritiana.

“The geophysical anomaly we have on that is parallel and about 100 metres offset to BHP‘s drilling that they carried out there where they got significant copper over 12 metres. We are hoping that this will be an exciting project too, but we’re not concentrating on that, we’re concentrating on the gold project at Tijirit from Shield’s point of view.”

The Tijirit Drilling Campaign
Netherway speaks excitedly of recent developments regarding their planned drilling campaign for Tijirit.

“We planned to do between 10,000 and 15,000 metres of drilling within the next 12 months on the Tijirit project. We drilled three of the current six prospects which we have in the first drilling campaign just to give us an idea of what’s going on so obviously we’re going to drill the other three prospects” he says.

“We’re going to go deeper and along strike on the three prospects that we’ve already drilled and we’re going to do more mineral work in the area to make sure that we haven’t missed anything else. It’s a great project and the geology is exactly the same as Tasiast. We want to make sure that this drilling really gives us something to get our teeth in to as a resource by the end of the next 12 months.”

Pointing out that “the best place to look for a gold mine is close to another one” Netherway explains that the geographical indication they can gain from the nearby Tasiast mine is extremely encouraging for Tijirit.

“All of the geology here is associated with the banded iron formations exactly as it is at Tasiast and really we’re just exploring those banded iron formations” he says.

“We’ve got about 30 KM of strike length to do this and there is a lot of that which we haven’t looked at so we’ve got a lot of work to do and we’ve got some very nice prospects there which we just hope will turn into ore bodies.”

Netherway’s Other News
In addition to Shield Mining, Netherway is involved in a number of other exciting projects today.

The first of these is African Aura Resources Limited; A TSX-listed company with a portfolio of exploration licenses based in Cameroon and Liberia.

“African Aura of which I am the chairman has agreed a merger with Mano River Resources. I’ll be the chairman of the combined group. Mano River is a bigger company than African Aura and it’s a friendly merger” Netherway says.

“It’s going to be very exciting; we’ve just done the mailing to the shareholders so this deal should be finished. We have our EGM on September 18 so by then the deal should be consummated.”

Another is Goldmines of Algeria, GMA Resources.

“We have an operating gold mine in the South of Algeria which is in production now and that’s a great company too” Netherway says.

There is also KazakhGold, the largest gold company in Kazakhstan and Netherway sits on their board too.

“That has just been taken over by Polyus and they are the largest gold company in Russia. That only happened a couple of weeks ago and I’m staying on that board as a non-executive director” he explains.

And finally there is the resource fund Altus Resource Capital (ARC); a Guernsey domiciled, closed ended investment company.

“We’ve just raised £26 million pounds for that fund and the fund is now about 30 to 40 per cent invested. It’s also pretty interesting because it’s the only resource fund that has got it together since the downturn and managed to raise some money to invest in other resource companies” Netherway says.

“It’s mandate is to invest in companies that are already in production or are near production less than $100 million dollars in market capital.”

Netherway has his finger firmly on the pulse of mining industry development, future potential, and present successes. As Shield embark upon their latest drilling program one thing rings clear; this is only just the beginning of the next chapter in Netherway’s exciting story and Shield’s promising future.