Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the annual general meeting of Perseus Mining Limited. My name is Sean Harvey, chairman of the company, and I have the privilege of chairing today's meeting. I welcome all shareholders and observers and declare the meeting open. Today's meeting will be a bit different from previous meetings. This is our first virtual annual general meeting, held via the Lumi platform, allowing shareholders, proxies, and guests to attend the meeting online. All attendees can watch a live webcast of the meeting, and shareholders and proxies have the ability to ask questions and submit votes. Because of the virtual nature of the meeting, and also to comply with the new ASX corporate governance principles, all voting will be conducted by a poll. We have the full board present today, be it in various locations across the globe. I am chairing this meeting from Toronto, Canada.
We have non-executive directors, John McGloin and David Ransom, attending from London and Melbourne respectively. In the Perth office, their managing director, Jeff Quartermaine, and non-executive directors, Daniel Lougher, as well as Elissa Brown, whose election as a new director is on the agenda today. A hearty welcome to Elissa. Questions can be submitted at any time. To ask a question, press on the screen bubble icon on your screen. This will open a new screen. At the bottom of that screen, there's a section for you to type your question. Once you have finished typing, please hit the arrow to send, the arrow symbol. Please indicate in your question which resolution the question refers to. We encourage you to submit your questions as early as possible so that they can be read when the relevant resolution is being dealt with.
There is a slight broadcast delay, and this will ensure we can keep the flow of the meeting going. Please note that your questions may be modified or, if we receive similar questions, rephrased as one question. The questions will be read by a moderator in the Perth office. As I said, voting today will be conducted by way of a poll on all items of business. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I will shortly open voting for all resolutions. At that time, if you're eligible to vote at this meeting, a new polling icon will appear. Selecting this icon will bring up a list of the resolutions and present you with voting options. To cast your vote, simply select one of the options. There is no need to hit or submit or enter button as the vote is automatically recorded.
You do, however, have the ability to change your vote up until the time I declare the voting closed. I now declare the voting open on all resolutions. The polling icon will soon appear. Please submit your votes at any time. I will give you a warning before I move to close voting. I will now move on to today's business. I will take notice of meeting as read. As the resolutions contain terms and conditions as set out in the explanatory memorandum, I will only read out the resolutions as they appear in the notice without full reference to the terms and conditions in the explanatory memorandum. We have the 2,000 financial statements and reports to consider and seven resolutions before us. Once the formal business of this meeting has been concluded, Managing Director Jeff Quartermaine will say a few words and answer any questions you may have.
I table for consideration the financial statements and reports by the directors and auditors of the company for the period ended June 30, 2020. I invite queries or comments on those statements and reports from shareholders. A representative from the company's auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, is attending online, and he will deal with any questions relating to the audit report. Are there any questions?
There are no questions, Sean.
Thank you very much, Andrew. We can now move on to the first resolution. Resolution one, adoption of the remuneration report. The resolution reads as follows, to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that the remuneration report, as set out in the directors report section of the 2020 annual report of the company, be adopted. The remuneration report for Perseus Mining is presented on pages 34 to 49 of the annual report. For the record, I note that this resolution is non-binding. The proxy results are shown on your screen. We'll just take a little bit of time with the delay to see if there's any questions, but as I think those of you who see the number, it's 99% in favor. Andrew, you can just let me know when you feel that an appropriate time has passed for questions.
Sure. There are no questions on this resolution.
Thank you. As the second resolution relates to my re-election, I will now hand over to Jeff Quartermaine, our MD in Perth, to chair this part of the meeting.
Thanks very much, Sean. Resolution number 2, re-election of Mr. Sean Harvey as a director. The second resolution reads as follows, to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that Mr. Sean Harvey, who retires in accordance with clause 3.6 of the constitution of the company and being eligible, offers himself for re-election, be it is hereby re-elected as a director of the company. Are there any questions?
There are no questions.
Thank you. In that case, I will now hand back to Sean in Toronto and offer my congratulations on your re-election to the board.
Thank you, Jeff. Resolution number three, re-election of Mr. John McGloin as a director. The third resolution reads as follows. To consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That Mr. John McGloin, who retires in accordance with clause 3.6 of the constitution of the company and being eligible, offers himself for re-election, be and is hereby re-elected as a director of the company. The proxy results are shown on your screen. Overwhelmingly in favor. Are there any questions?
There are no questions.
Thank you. Resolution number four, the election of Ms. Elissa Brown as director. The fourth resolution reads as follows: To consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution. That Ms. Elissa Brown, on recommendation by the board, be and is hereby elected as a director of the company. Again, the proxy results are shown on your screen, overwhelmingly in favor. Are there any questions?
There are no questions.
Thank you. Resolution five, renewal of the Performance Rights Plan. The fifth resolution reads as follows: To consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following as an ordinary resolution. For the purpose of ASX Listing Rule 7.2, exception 9B, Section 613 of the TSX Company Manual, and all other purposes, the directors be, and are hereby authorized to maintain the Performance Rights Plan of the company known as the Perseus Mining Limited Performance Rights Plan, the PR Plan.
A summary of which is set out in the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of the meeting and the grant of the performance rights and the issue of shares thereunder, be and is hereby approved as an exception to the ASX Listing Rule 10.1, provided that the company shall only have the ability to issue performance rights thereunder until November 25th, 2023, whereupon the PR plan must be reapproved by shareholders. A copy of the PR plan is tabled for the purposes of this meeting. Again, the proxy results are shown on your screen, overwhelmingly in favor. Are there any questions, Andrew?
There are no questions on this resolution.
Thank you. Resolution six, approval of the issue of performance rights to Mr. Quartermaine. The sixth resolution reads as follows: To consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following as an extraordinary resolution. Sorry, as an ordinary resolution. That for the purposes of the ASX Listing Rule 10.14 and for all other purposes, the issue of performance rights and the Performance Rights Plan to Mr. Geoffrey Quartermaine on the terms set out in the explanatory memorandum accompanying the notice of meeting be and is hereby approved. The proxy results are on the screen. Again, overwhelmingly in favor. Andrew?
There are no questions.
Thank you very much. The last is the amendment of the constitution, resolution seven. I note that this is a special resolution which requires a 75% majority of votes cast in favor to pass. The seventh resolution reads as follows: To consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following as a special resolution. That under and for the purposes of Section 136(2) of the Corporations Act, and for all other purposes, approval is given to the company to modify the constitution by making the amendment summarized in the explanatory memorandum with effect immediately upon passing of this resolution. The proxy results are on the screen, and over 99% are in favor. Any questions?
There are no questions.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our discussion on the items of business. In a minute or two here, I will close the voting system. Please ensure that you've cast your vote on all resolutions. We'll now pause for 30 seconds or so just to allow people to finish any voting that there is. We'll close the voting. If everybody could just take a brief pause here. We'll allow people to finish voting. We'll just keep it open for about another 30 seconds. If you haven't voted, please do so now if you wish to. Okay, thank you, everyone. I now declare that the voting is closed. Given the time of day in Perth, the results of these votes will be released to the Australian and Toronto stock exchanges in the morning.
That concludes the formal part of today's business, and I declare the formal meeting closed. I will now hand over to the Managing Director, Jeff Quartermaine, who will say a few words. You are still able to ask questions, which Jeff will deal with. I would normally have invited the attendees to join us for drinks and canapes after the meeting. I sincerely hope we should be able to do that again next year. Thank you very much for your attendance and support of the company. I'll now turn it over to Jeff Quartermaine, our managing director. Jeff?
Thank you very much, Sean, and good day, ladies and gentlemen. During the last 12 months, each of us who have been employed in the mining industry has been presented with a set of challenges that many of us have never encountered before. For us at Perseus, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic meant that for a significant part of the year, we've been operating in uncharted waters. Notwithstanding the fact that the outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa in 2016 had previously alerted us to the possibility of a contagion posing a material risk to our business. I am pleased to be able to report that so far, Perseus has emerged from the COVID crisis relatively unscathed.
If anything, we have emerged stronger as we continue on our path to achieve our target of producing at least 500,000 ounces of gold per year at a cash margin of not less than $400 per ounce. In doing so, position ourselves to consistently deliver on our corporate mission of generating benefits for all of our stakeholders in fair and equitable proportions. While the global uncertainty related to COVID-19 has made it impossible at times to guarantee ongoing strong performance, we've done our absolute best to deliver it. In this regard, I think we've been reasonably successful. Development of our third gold mine, Yaouré, which was a very big undertaking this year given the COVID challenge, is now very well advanced.
We expect to pour our first gold at the mine within weeks, inside of our stretch target of pouring first gold by the end of this calendar year. When fully operational, we expect Yaouré to produce on average about 215,000 ounces of gold per year in the first five years of operation at an all-in site cost of $750 per ounce or so, and have a mine life of eight years or more based on the current Ore Reserve inventory. It is said that seeing is believing, so let me now show you a short video of what our outstanding construction team, our contractors, and their subcontractors have achieved at Yaouré by the end of the month. We start the video at the front gate of the Yaouré site, with the Perseus sign proudly displayed.
We are at the far west end of the exploration permit looking towards the east. In the foreground, you can see some old pits with water, which we'll be using for processing. We fly over the waste dumps. You can see in the foreground now the old heap leach pad. Some of this material will be used for commissioning purposes. Now we can see the construction of the processing plant in the foreground. Now, you can see in the background, there is a very large lake, Lake Kossou, which is the source of water for a hydroelectric dam, which is in very close proximity to our mine site. We're now heading over the hill towards the tailings facility. This is a fully completed structure, downstream construction, lined with plastic to protect the environment.
There's something like 500 ML of water in there already. That water will be used in the processing facility going forward. We've achieved full practical completion on that to date. Here is the fuel facility. That is about 950,000 L of fuel, which will be used by EPSA, our mining contractor. You can see that EPSA is well advanced in terms of temporary and final facilities to house their mining operation. You can see the beginning of mining here in the CMA pit. This is the main source of ore for the mine during the first five or six years of the mine. We were quite well advanced, working day shift and night shift, and mining at very good rates to date, and excellent progress being achieved. We're now heading to the processing facility.
This is the run of mine stockpile area, and you can see the first material on the run of mine stockpile now. Material is picked up from the stockpile by front end loader, put into the crusher, and crushed, and then taken by conveyor CV1 to a crushed ore stockpile. You can see that on that stockpile, there's about 50,000 tons of material as we speak, all ready to be put into the mill to test the mill in due course. Now, sitting underneath that crushed ore stockpile is a reclaim facility, a reclaim chamber, and conveyors. The ore falls through into the chamber, and it is then transported by a conveyor to the mill, which you can see in the middle of that shot there. As we go, you can see the water dams on the left-hand side, fresh water, the events pond, et cetera.
You can see in the foreground the mills, the ball mill, the SAG mill. You can see the cyclone sitting on top of the superstructure there, then the CIL tanks, seven CIL tanks all in a row, all ready to be receiving ore in the very, very near future. You can see at the back there the administration buildings, warehouses, et cetera, on the left, on the right, you can see the Yaouré substation. The Yaouré 90 kV substation is fully commissioned and operable at this point in time. We're panning over the top of that, you can see a couple of backup generators in the event that we don't have power from the grid. These generators have been used in the commissioning process so far. This is the gold room and elution circuit, now fully complete and ready for commissioning.
This is a shot of the 90 kV Kossou substation and the cables that connect that to the plant. We're heading over a river, the Bandama River, which comes through from the dam, and this is the water extraction. Water's taken from here by a pipeline along the corridor, the same corridor as the 90 kV electrical line runs up to the plant. We have various spur lines taking off at 11 kV to outlying facilities like the TSF and low security. The low security point is about a kilometer from the plant, and it's at this point that we're able to check all visitors to the site to make sure that only those with good intent come on board. We're now looking at the magazine. This is very well advanced, the earthworks, and we're starting civil construction. That will be finished fairly shortly as well.
What we are seeing now is the parts of the camp. This camp is currently housing 637 people. In full operations, about 230. As you'd expect, we provide suitable facilities to make life a little more bearable for our workers. You can see a beautiful camp cut into the hill, quite spectacular under lights. That's the Yaouré development site, of which we're extremely proud. I should say that bringing on our third mine online has been a very important focus this year. As you've just seen, it's kept us very busy. Ticking over in the background, our two producing mines, Edikan and Sissingué, have delivered improved operational performance during the second half of the year after a slower first half. We produced nearly 260,000 ounces of gold at the two mines during fiscal 2020, with our all-in site costs averaging $972 per ounce.
We're very similar to what we had done in the previous year. Costs were impacted by our COVID-19 measures in the second half of the year. In the June quarter, these measures added about AUD 20 an ounce to our production cost. Notwithstanding this, we were able to generate very strong cash flows. From our operations, that amounted to approximately AUD 213 million during the course of the year. We've recently outlined plans to extend the future of both of our operating mines, albeit in different ways. The current life of our Sissingué operation is relatively short, and we've sought to extend this by acquiring Exore Resources Limited, an exploration company that owned about 2,000 square kilometers of very prospective land adjacent to Sissingué.
Exploration success on this ground would offer us the opportunity to either truck material to Sissingué or alternatively develop the deposit into a standalone mining operation using the infrastructure from Sissingué. Since completing acquisition in September, we've been conducting resource definition drilling at the three deposits located on the tenements. Results to date are encouraging, we expect to be able to announce an updated Mineral Resource in the new year and release the results of a Feasibility Study on developing the resources by the end of the first quarter in 2021. At Edikan, we identified potential for an underground mining operation at the Esuajah South deposit, which has a measured and indicated resource of more than 500,000 ounces of gold. We are gradually progressing this work, having received government approvals in the June quarter to move ahead.
The approvals allow development of the decline and establishment of ore drives on the first three sub-levels of the ore body, which will allow us to better assess the deposit before proceeding to full-scale development or not. We have been out to tender for underground mining services and are working our way through these offers. If this concept can be proven to be economically viable, this will be an exciting step for us as a company, as it would be Perseus' first underground mine development. Although, many of our people are individually very experienced underground miners. Understandably, given our lack of corporate experience as underground miners, we're moving forward cautiously with this exercise, but we look forward to bringing news of this potential opportunity in the new year.
As our operations grow, Perseus continues to work very hard on improving our capacity to effectively discharge our environmental, social, and governance responsibilities, with priority being given to supporting our host communities and governments in both Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, and in the process, ensure that our social license to operate in these countries remains in good standing. During the past year, Perseus has paid royalties and taxes totaling AUD 83 million to the Ghanaian and Ivorian governments, while also offering support to local communities through implementation of education, health, and environmental programs. We have a strong local workforce at each of our operating sites, and we aim to provide training and employment opportunities at a range of levels for members of our host communities. To date, we have recorded 99% of our local employment in Ghana.
99% of the workforce in Ghana are local employees. 90% of those in Côte d'Ivoire are also local employees. Across the two sites, approximately 11% of our workforce is made up of women. We're also carefully examining ways of minimizing our carbon footprint. In this regard, the fact that all of the power that we will use at Yaouré, other than emergency standby power, will be generated from a renewable energy source, namely, a hydroelectric power, represents a very significant step forward in this area. Looking ahead to 2021, commissioning and ramp up of production at Yaouré is a major objective for the coming months. We're also looking forward to publishing the Feasibility Study for the development of a series of deposits located on the recently acquired Exore ground, resulting in an extension of the life of the very successful Sissingué operation.
We also expect to further optimize production at both Edikan and Sissingué with continuous improvement initiatives aimed at increasing gold production and reducing our all-in site costs. We have several exciting exploration programs planned to roll out across the properties, most notably at Yaouré, as we look to deliver material organic growth at each of our three operating sites. Despite the challenges of the past year and the uncertainty ahead of us, it's an exciting time in our company's growth. I look forward very much to bringing news of this in the coming year. Before I close, I should note that in recent years, Perseus has shown itself to be a company that does not rest on its laurels. We continue to set new goals, we continue to deliver on our promises.
Our share price is starting to reflect the results of these endeavors, but in our view, it still has some way to go before it truly reflects the value of your company. Finally, I'd like to pay a special tribute to the men and women of Perseus, both in West Africa and in Australia. This has been a very tough year in a number of ways for many people around the globe. For our team, there was no exception. The way our employees have responded to the challenges has been of the highest caliber. To illustrate the point, due to travel restrictions, many of our employees, including both local employees and expatriates, had no alternative but to work extended rosters and to endure hardship of regular isolation and in quarantining.
As well as being physically and mentally draining, this placed pressure on their families, many of whom were also living in challenging circumstances. The team responded extremely well, very positively, demonstrating understanding and in most instances, good humor at the discomfort. Their contribution to Perseus has been enormous, and I know I speak on behalf of the board, and hopefully our shareholders, in offering our sincere thanks for our employees' outstanding service in a time of adversity. As I said, despite the challenges and the uncertainty, it's a very exciting time for our company. I look forward to talking again with you next year and talking further about the goals that we have achieved in the next 12 months. Thank you very much for your attention. That brings to close this session. I'm happy to answer any questions if there are any. Andrew, are there questions?
There are no questions, Jeff.
In that case, thank you very much for your attendance, and I will bring today's session to a close. Good night.