Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Orosur Mining Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all of the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I'd now like to hand you over to Chairman Louis Castro. Good morning, sir.
Good morning. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the company's webinar. I am Louis Castro, Chairman of the company, and the other person on the screen is Brad George, CEO. We held the company's AGM on Friday, just this last Friday. All the resolutions were passed. As in previous years, what we're doing today is effectively extending on that AGM and having a Q&A session with shareholders and other potential investors. We've had a busy year. Brad will go into more detail on this in his presentation, which he's about to kick off. There is a bit of a hiatus at the moment. We're going into discussions with Minera Monte Águila, and again, we'll cover this in more detail during the presentation.
Those discussions are ahead of signing a new joint venture to cover phase two of our project in Anzá. We also have other activities ongoing in Argentina and Brazil, so things are moving along. There will be a bit of a slowdown in Colombia. We'll go into detail in a few minutes. Thank you for your questions. We will address those as well at the end of the presentation. Without any more further ado, Brad, I'll hand over to you.
All right. Thanks, Louis. I will also make note to shareholders that Louis is currently in Bogotá. It's what, 4:30 A.M., Louis? You flew overnight and missed the England game, so we've taken one for the team. Lucky you won, otherwise it'd be a very depressing morning. What I'll do today is just run through a quick presentation. Many of you probably would have seen much of this before. We've added a few things that are relevant to what's happened in the last few days. There's obviously a range of questions that have been pre-submitted, and some are coming after we speak. We can then have a bit of a Q&A.
We have no time limit here, so I do tend to go on a bit. I'll try to keep this, you know, as painless as I can for most of you, so. The usual disclaimer which nobody ever reads. A snapshot. This hasn't changed. While obviously we had a bit of a share price fall on Friday for reasons largely related to the latest drilling results out of Colombia, and I'll speak to those in more detail in a couple of slides' time to sort of add a bit of meat to that.
What is perhaps not known to many shareholders is that all announcements that we make that are related to the Colombian joint venture need to go through Agnico and Newmont first for their editorial oversight. They tend to be a bit brutal in their editorial oversight and they beat them to death. Most of what is, you know, most of what we might say that's interesting is removed. We tend to use these presentations to add a bit of meat. The one change here is that so the roughly $10.8 million in warrants are going to expire very soon. They're obviously somewhat out of the money now, so they will fall away.
Our diluted share capital will actually reduce in a couple of weeks' time. To give some history for those of you who've been here for a long time, Orosur Mining, or under its previous name, Uruguay Mineral Exploration, has been around for 20-odd years, probably more. It was originally a gold miner in Uruguay. We had a reasonably sized little project down there called San Gregorio, which ran for just shy of 20 years, produced about 1.5 million ounces and ultimately came to a sort of a rather messy end in about 2017, 2018, as most mines do. That put the company in a difficult position financially for a few years. That ultimately led to the joint venture with Newmont on the Colombian project in September 2018.
Louis and I joined the company in 2020 to try to sort of lift the company back to a position where it was investable. I think from memory, the share price at the time was about 1.7p, and we had little cash in the bank. We have achieved a few things and, you know, we are as a company quite proud that we've made the company to the current position, albeit it's often a complicated story to tell. We have three projects now that Uruguay is by and large wound back and off the books now. Anzá Gold Project in Colombia is our flagship project. That is under joint venture originally to Newmont, but now to Newmont and Agnico.
They formed their own little joint venture 50/50. They jointly run that project, although Agnico is the operator of the project. You know, Newmont is the world's largest gold miner. Agnico now, post the merger with Kirkland Lake, is now the third largest gold miner in the world. It's nice to have companies running the project that have very deep pockets because Colombia, particularly in the rugged terrain, is a place that needs deep pockets.
We also have the El Pantano Gold Project in southern Argentina, which is a very early-stage project, but recent work is beginning to show some promise, and I'll talk to that. And the Ariquemes tin project in western Brazil, which is equally. We call it an early-stage project, but it's surrounded by existing mining operations. It's kind of a greenfield brownfield project, which again is showing some interesting promise. Back to Anzá. That project has been run now. We've been drilling there since about 2013. 2012, 2013. With the previous owners, with us, and with Agnico and Newmont, we are now something like 45,000 m has been drilled, mostly in the one spot.
It's the movement out of that central location to the northern projects which has sort of created the excitement, and when we see the ultimate potential. El Pantano, as I'll talk about, is interesting, and Ariquemes also showing some results. Off to Anzá. We're in northwestern Colombia. We're just about 50 km due west of Medellín. Without getting too esoteric in the geology, we're in what is referred to as the Mid Cauca Belt. It's a roughly north-south striking zone of late Miocene rocks. For non-geologists, Miocene's a. It's quite young. It varies from about 10 to 70 million years. It's fairly young in geological time.
Mostly volcanics, intrusions, some sediments that sit just to the east of the Andes mountain range, and they're sort of part of that same volcanic system that creates the Andes. The Mid Cauca Belt plays host to most of the big gold projects in Colombia. There's a range of projects there that range from underlying porphyry systems to what we've got, which is an overlying epithermal system. An epithermal system sits above a porphyry. So depending on the elevation, the gold projects in the region vary from those two extremes. Probably the key project in the region is just north of us at Buriticá. That was a project that was run by Continental Gold, who actually, casting back, were the original owners of Anzá.
They had to make a decision on the two projects due to lack of money back in the old days. They chose Buriticá, and Anzá went to us, and Buriticá is now owned by Chinese firm Zijin, currently sitting at probably 10-12 million ounces at quite high grade. That's an operating mine now. We're in the right area. Yeah, we're in the right area geologically, and we're quite comfortable that we're seeing similar things happening at Anzá as we're seeing at Buriticá. We have confidence, but it's obviously a difficult place. Our land holding is reasonably substantial for this region. We've got a range of granted titles. They're the ones in green.
The applications in red totaling about 200 sq km, which is a nice parcel. We don't want too big. Holding land in Colombia is moderately expensive compared to neighboring countries. Having a large land or having everything converted from applications to granted titles can be quite expensive. Most of the applications were left as such over many years, largely as a cost-saving measure. It's probably the eastern side of this that's most interesting. You know, the more work we've done, the more we realize where the best structures are, and that runs up from along the eastern margin.
We've got about 20 km strike of two key structures, the Argelia Fault and the Tonusco faults, which we're finding that these are the main controlling structures. As we go further to the west, we're getting into some more complicated porphyry systems, and there's a company to the west of us called Royal Road who are sitting on some interesting porphyry things. The porphyries tend to be a bit lower grade, and grade can make a difference in this sort of terrain. We're quite comfortable on the eastern side where we've got some sort of better rocks. There will probably be a reduction in this. As part of the normal process of exploration, we have to drop land off. This is what happens all over the world.
You know, we understand where we want to be, and we reduce our land holdings. This will reduce as we work our way around forest reserves, and we drop land off as a cost-saving measure. We've got a couple of applications just to the south that may be added to this. We'll try to balance up with what we drop off with new ground being added. That will become clear in coming weeks and months as we move forward. We obviously are going to maintain the what we think now is the key ground. Those of you who followed the story would also notice that we've changed, or not we, Agnico changed all the prospect names.
This is essentially a security issue to remove any kind of geographical content from the names. Previously, the prospect names were named after the local villages, but now they've become somewhat agnostic to villages so that we can. We're not giving away tipped information that might attract artisanal miners. You'll also note that all of the maps on our presentations announcements lack coordinates for the same reason. In the middle here, we see the APTA prospect. Now, APTA was the original gold prospect that was drilled from about 2012, and that was the only place we drilled really up until beginning of this year. Gold was found there because it was part of an old gypsum mine.
There were tracks and access pads in place. It was an easy place to drill, and drilling was focused there and there were some very high grade, very thick intersections there over the years. It's a little more complicated. It's sort of a hybrid VMS epithermal system, but shows promise and, you know, some very nice numbers in there. We didn't go north, however, or various company didn't go north or south, largely due to one, lack of money when we were on the project, and then COVID, of course. Agnico and Newmont joined the joint venture in the middle of COVID. We kept operating, but we had to operate in bubbles, and moving north and south was quite a risky thing to do during COVID.
We did mapping and sampling north and south, but drilling only commenced in early to middle of this year at the Pepas project to the north. It's been a long time getting to the point where we could drill those highly prospective prospects. It was nice to get up there. At the moment, we're also mapping and sampling to the south at El Cedro and El Roble, showing some very promising results down there, which we've talked about in previous announcements and, you know, they're moving to the point of perhaps being drill prospects quite soon, but there's obviously a permitting issue. I'll jump forward now.
You know, people can go back to previous announcements at Anzá, but it was Pepas to the north that sort of created a high level of excitement when drilling began there early in the year, and obviously some disappointment on Friday with the latest results. Pepas was a prospect that had been known for some time. We identified some very high-grade rock chips and veins on surface running many tens of grams. The first hole there was drilled earlier, and of course, came back with some, you know, what can only be described as quite spectacular result, 150 m at 3 grams from surface, I might point out. That was quite. It got everybody very excited, quite justifiably. Those sorts of things happen very rarely.
A couple of subsequent holes from the same location gave numbers that were, you know, of the same sort of magnitude. Now, the issue here is, and this is where it gets a bit esoteric. I do apologize. It's hard for me to show in three dimensions when you can't see me. It's an inherent fact that the first hole into a new prospect, while it can give very nice numbers like these, it doesn't give information related to the orientation or the shape of the target. In our particular case, it was made worse by the fact that the drill hole was located on top of the mineralized body and mineralization started from surface.
Yes, it was a very nice intersection, but there are multiple interpretations of those intersections, and we really don't understand the depth, the strike, the shape of this thing. For that to happen, we have to step back and drill from the sides. We ideally want drill holes to be starting from outside, coming in one side, drilling through the ore body and coming out other side. We had to make a decision as to how we were going to do that. Two problems, however. One is that we had no idea which way to go. There were some maybe very small hints in the drilling to suggest east or west, but really it was a bit of a coin toss. Ultimately, we tossed.
Well, Agnico tossed the coin to go west, largely because that was an easier place to go. In this country, the second issue is that moving the drill rig here is not a trivial task. I mean, in Australia, we just move the truck a couple of meters. Here, putting in a new pad is a monumental task of identifying where to put it, sending guys in with axes and shovels to build it, and then moving the rig itself is just a horrifying task with helicopters and it's not something you do lightly. The rigs were moved to the west and drilled in from the western side on the basis of thinking that the ore body or the mineralized body dipped toward the west.
Now, as the last drilling showed on Friday, maybe that was the wrong call. I don't necessarily have an issue with that. It was a bit of a line ball call anyway, and a 1 in 2 chance of it being wrong. But there were some other issues in where those holes were positioned that I'm slightly cautious of not being too critical of our JV partners. They by and large have done an amazing job. But I would have drilled those holes differently.
If I know that there is uncertainty about the direction of dip of this body, then I would have drilled the hole from the west and made sure it hit the target by drilling it into the middle of the old intersections, and then stepped out in small increments. To drill from the west and then also drill over 200 m below the system ran the risk that if the interpretation of dip was incorrect, then the hole would entirely miss the target. That's in my view what's happened here, that the target looks like it's now dipping probably more to the southeast. By drilling from the west and by drilling deep, we essentially stood no chance of hitting it.
These holes, to my mind at least, have been. Maybe they're positive and they've shown us that it was from the wrong direction, but it, to my mind, is a reasonably expensive way to have done it. While these on paper are obviously quite disappointing holes compared to the previous holes, if you understand how drilling works and how structural geology works, actually, they didn't address any questions at all. They've not in any way, to my mind, reduced the prospectivity of this. In fact, they've increased it by now telling us where to go. It's just that it was a very expensive exercise to do that. That was the primary reason for Agnico wishing to slow down drilling, because clearly, again, they have to move the pads, and that's not something that they can do overnight.
It will be weeks, many weeks and months to get those locations permitted, new pads built, so on and so forth. It's a complicated process, and they would also like to do some more surface work now just to confirm. I mean, these holes are not cheap. Drilling, diamond drilling here is about $250 m. You know, these holes are not cheap, and they wanna make sure this time that they get it right. That's been underway, and we hope that we can get those sort of things resolved in the reasonably near term.
Which then leads us, I guess, to the main question of what happens next, and this just comes to the point of the work going on and the joint venture. Yes, drilling is suspended by and large for technical reasons, but also a few political reasons that relate somewhat to the joint venture and where it currently stands. Mapping and sampling continues in the south, so we still have ground crews down there firming up those targets and they'll be turning those into drill targets for as and when drilling recommences. The major point, however, is that we're in a bit of a limbo time-wise with the joint venture.
The joint venture was designed to run for 12 years in three phases, and we've just come to the end of the first phase in early September this year. During those first four years, $10 million was spent and $2 million was given to us as option fees. Agnico and Newmont, by completing phase one, have the right to earn 51%, and they have the right to move into phase II . Now, phase II is $20 million over four years, but probably more importantly, it actually requires the development of a new joint venture. Phase I was an exploration agreement. They just basically had the right to work.
Phase II now is we form a formal joint venture, and that requires the creation of a new company, the creation of new documentation that outlines all of the terms and agreements in that JV. Now, that's where things get a bit complicated, is that there are two primary issues that we need to resolve, and this I guess explains why things are taking a bit longer than we would've liked. The first point is that the rules have changed.
When these structures were created back in 2014 going forward, everything was run through a holding company in Colombia, Minera Anzá, which then fed into a BVI company and then through to Canada on the rationale that any transaction with Agnico and Newmont would be done in BVI and therefore be taxed in a fairly favorable way. That no longer works. The Colombian government has changed the rules, and they would now look through that BVI structure, and they would want to see or want to see tax levied on any transaction that involved Colombian assets.
The original plan no longer works, and we need to be very careful to develop a new transaction structure that not only reduces or hopefully eliminates any kind of tax to be levied, but also gives us the flexibility to deal with whatever might happen in 3, 4, or 5 years' time. That's a reasonably complicated process. I'm not a lawyer, so I step back and leave it to Louis and the team. It's not easy. Even though we're not getting any cash for the asset, the fact that so much has been spent to this point means that there is essentially a sale taking place. We're very conscious of making sure we understand exactly what that process of.
or what that structure looks like. We are quite comfortable now with how that works, and we think we've got that nailed down as to how to move forward. The other question, however, is that Agnico and Newmont have requested to make some changes to the joint venture, and this is where things are becoming a little bit slower. Even though phase two requires a new joint venture, the understanding of the original agreement is that the terms of that joint venture were agreed to at the beginning. We have generally the right to say, "Well, no, we're gonna stick with the terms as they were laid out in 2018." Our partners are wanting to make some changes to that.
Not unsurprisingly, those changes are entirely in their own favor, which I understand. We, you know, we are very conscious of one, not giving away something for free, and two, we have some concerns that some of those requests might create potential risks for us in a couple of years' time. I won't go into the details, but we certainly are at this stage holding firm and making quite sure that we don't give away potentially long-term value simply to try and get some short-term gain. There are some issues with what's being requested in phase III that we would see as quite problematic going forward in 4-5 years' time. We're at that point now where we are just bouncing ideas and things across.
That's sadly a little bit slow. You know, Orosur being a small company is quite able to respond quickly. Agnico and Newmont, because they're two major companies, seem to be a bit slower. Every time we bounce around an idea, it takes a week or two to come back. We are progressing. We're not stalled, but we are coming now down to a couple of major points that we need to resolve, and hopefully we'll do those in the next coming days and weeks. Importantly, once that's resolved, that triggers an option payment to Orosur of $2 million.
As things currently stand, we were given notification of Agnico and Newmont's intention to move to phase two at the beginning of September. We are now in that process of putting it together, and that triggers a payment in January at this stage of $2 million. Now, that's still on the table. Whether that happens is still remains to be seen, but that's still the plan. If that changes, obviously we would let people know. That at this stage there's been no change to that schedule. Clearly we
This has dragged on to the point where we're getting near the allowed 90 days to resolve the issues, and I think we're all at the point now where we know what the final options are and we're just having a little bit of a haggle now. That's a complicated process, and I won't apologize for how long it takes, because I would rather do it right than do it fast. Because doing it fast and making a mistake has the potential to really come back and bite us quite severely in a couple of years' time. It might sound easy on paper, but we need to think about every possible outcome or how things might play out in 4-5 years' time.
It's actually, you know, it's gonna be a 60-70-page document. It's quite a complicated beast, so these things, there's no prizes for doing them fast. Moving into other projects. We've, you know, we've spoken in the past about other projects and clearly, for quite some years, the company was not in a position to look at new projects due to lack of finances. Once Agnico Eagle came into Colombia and we were able to raise some money at the end of 2020, we had the funds and we had the time to look at new projects. The question was, how do we do it?
Our strategy was that we would, you know, given our balance sheet was strong, but not ironclad, we didn't want to go and buy our way into projects at huge cost. We looked at projects that were in the right parts of the world or in very much well-endowed regions, new operating mines, had the right geology, had very large landholdings, which I thought was very important, and that we could negotiate entry for free and very low burn rates for the first couple of years so that we had time and flexibility to do the background work. We were not committing ourselves to big upfront payments in the first couple of years.
You know, we really like to have flexibility and options, just to see how things pan out. The first of these was the Ariquemes project in Western Brazil, in Rondônia province. It's a tin project. Now you might ask, "Well, why tin?" And I'll say, "Well, why not?" Tin's a pretty exciting metal, albeit not as well known perhaps as lithium and nickel and cobalt and more of the battery metals. But it's regarded as being the glue for everything. Everything we do in the electrification space ultimately requires solder, and solder is tin. So it's an absolutely vital metal.
It's quite a small global market, and most importantly, it's becoming very difficult to source supplies that we might see as ESG compliant, given that the most is coming out of artisanal workings in Asia, coming out of China, coming out of parts of Africa that maybe don't play by the ESG rules to the degree that we might. It's becoming quite a fragile market. We looked at these projects a couple of years ago. The tin price, as you may have noted, went a bit crazy beginning of this year. It went from its, you know, historical levels of about $18,000-$20,000 a ton to $45,000 a ton. It's come back, fortunately, to more sensible levels.
The region of Rondônia in the west is really one of the major provinces of the world, tin production. It's produced something like 400,000 tons over the years from a couple of hard rock mines and alluvial mines. We understand exactly where the geology is. It's very mining-friendly. We have three tin furnaces in the main town, Araxá, meaning that we can sell material just locally. It's very developed, lots of roads. This is the Amazon basin, but it's all been cleared for farming. Environmentally, it's quite safe. Very mining-friendly, cheap power, cheap water. It's good transport. It's got a lot going for it. We had the opportunity through a Canadian company, Meridian Mining, to take up a JV for a very large land holding of 3,000 sq km.
That's a very difficult, very rare thing to get. We had a lot of free government data as well. That was a good project. We've been working on that now for a couple of months, largely in a fairly slow burn, regional sampling way, just taking stream sediment samples across the entire project. Given the size of the project, that's taken some months. It's a slow process. Moving around over such large areas takes time, and that's largely completed now. We know what we're looking for. We know the geology. We've carried out sampling across, as these things show, across the entire region. We're just waiting on the assays to come back now. We're getting a few in from the south. We've worked our way south to north.
The preliminary results are looking quite positive, so they'll be probably complete, we would hope, before Christmas. Obviously, December is a fairly hard month to get things done, we'll see how we go. The objective then there is to really use the regional data to focus down on the key areas. Not only to focus, but also to begin to drop land off. 3,000 km is great, but it's also expensive if we have to maintain the licenses. Part of exploration is as quickly as you can prune off the ground you've got and focus, because it's just you can't hold land of this size.
We'll begin the process in January of beginning to isolate and chop off bits and come back down to the key areas and work in more detail. It's a very attractive area. There's also the potential for some deals with some of the local players who may be lacking capital to mine more in a more advanced way. Most of the mining in the area is very artisanal, very low quality, very low recoveries. In a lot of cases, only the tin is produced when actually there's also probably equal value in niobium or columbite, as this mineral is called.
There are some issues there that we can potentially substantially enhance the recoveries and the revenue from existing mines by bringing in, you know, what we might refer to as modern technology, modern sampling techniques. That's a slow burn, and that was potentially the place, but it looks to us to be a, yeah, potential to build a fairly major industry there if things go well. That'll begin to work again in the new year. The other project, again, along the same lines, large landholding, low entry cost was in the south of Argentina, in Santa Cruz province. Argentina's a federation of states, and so the states themselves control mining. Whether or not mining is welcome is a state-by-state issue.
Santa Cruz province is absolutely pro-mining, so it's one of the great places to go. It's also fortunately a place that's very, very well-endowed with gold. There's a couple of major projects in the region. Just to the southeast of us is Cerro Vanguardia, which is run by AngloGold. It's probably 4-5 million ounces. Just off to the east is Cerro Moro, which is Yamana, which is about 3 million ounces. Up to the northwest is Cerro Negro, which is Newmont. Which they inherited through Barrick, who inherited it through Goldcorp. That's currently running at about, I think, 6 or 7 million ounces. It does have the right rocks, it does have the right things going on. Obviously being close to those mines gives us a bit of a consolidation play.
It's extremely mining-friendly 'cause it's very desolate. Essentially no one lives here. It's just very dry, miserably cold, but good power, good water, good infrastructure. We can work quite happily. Again, we looked at projects that were very early stage, and we liked the idea that we could get into an area which is essentially unexplored with a very low-cost JV on a very large piece of land. That was done last year. That was a good deal. Unusually, we have the mechanism on that joint venture to earn 100%, which is really quite rare. I mean, most joint ventures, the partner coming in can get to maybe 70, 75.
We have the right to come all the way to 100%, which gives us, again, the options that should this prove to be attractive, we have options to do it ourselves or bring in other partners. It's, again, the optionality is key. We've subsequently found that Argentina's becoming a very attractive place, and everybody suddenly is coming to look down there because it's mining-friendly. Politically, it has its color, but it's actually very mining-friendly. While it has economic challenges locally, those challenges actually work to make exploration there extremely cheap. It's actually a combination of the finances, the very flat terrain makes it a very cheap place to explore.
For a junior company, we can work here, whereas Colombia, you know, by dint of its terrain is quite challenging. It's a very good place to work and we're quite happy to be there. The Deseado Massif is the main thing. We're looking at tertiary or quite old volcanics, but the mineralization is tertiary, so it's about 150 million years old. It's quite well known. We look for sort of these north-south or north-west structures. The area we've got, there was no drilling, but certainly there was a lot of groundwork to suggest that there was some major alteration systems suggestive of a low-sulfur epithermal system. That was interesting.
We've gone in beginning of this year and done a couple of phases of geochemistry, which came back with extremely positive results that we announced previously. Excuse me. We then have to have a winter recess. This place is pretty grim, so from about May to September, it's only for the brave, given the Arctic winds. We've gone back in September and we're doing a few more phases of geochemistry, plus ground magnetics and just general mapping. Again, the ground mag is really giving us some very fine detail of the major controlling structures. We're extending our geochemistry beyond the anomalous areas we mapped. Then just wandering around, just an old-fashioned way of wandering around looking for things. We're finding veins here and there.
We're beginning to find things that were previously unknown, undiscovered, which is again quite rare in these major mining districts, to be able to go out and find previously unknown mineralized systems. You know, we're moving forward there. The teams are still there mapping and sampling, and we have assays in the lab now. Again, Christmas permitting, we hope to have some assays coming out of there at the end of the year, but if not, beginning of next year. This is becoming an interesting project. This project was very much meant to be slow burn. Slow burn, low cash burn. But if these numbers from the current sampling campaign come back positively, we might reassess that.
If we find some interesting drill targets, that might change in the new year. Having said that, we can't drill on the current permits. We need to submit some reports to move to a drilling permit. There wouldn't be any drilling here, and therefore there wouldn't be any major cash burn here until the second half of next year after the winter, so it would be September. It's quite exciting geologically, but you know, we'll see how that one plays out at the end of this month. That brings us to the end. I think the company is in a good position or certainly in a better position than when we found it, 2020.
You know, Anzá, despite, you know, the two steps forward, one step back situation is still very exciting. You know, we're not gonna walk away from those recent drill holes at Pepas, even though there's a bit of thought required. They, you know, are nothing short of spectacular. The move to phase two of the joint venture, it's taking time. It's taking time for a good reason, and we're not gonna apologize for the time it takes. There'll be no prizes for getting it wrong, so we have to really be careful with that. We hope to get back to drilling in Anzá soon, but that's obviously out of our hands, depending upon how things pan out. Brazil tin venture looking good. El Pantano is, as I said, looking quite exciting.
We've got the company in what I think is a good position, albeit in a market where things are very difficult out there and but you know, we have the cash in the bank and we have hopefully more coming in January. I think we're in quite a strong position. I'll leave it there and I thank you for listening to me droning on, but I'm happy now to move into a range of questions and take as long as you like.
Brad, Louis, if I may just jump back in there and thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. If I may, I will just bring back up your cameras there. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Louis, Brad, we did receive a number of pre-submitted questions ahead of today's event. As you can see in the Q&A tab there, we have also received a number of questions during your presentation this morning too.
Firstly, thank you to everyone on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Brad, Louis, if I could just hand back to you to address those where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Okay. What I think we'll do is that I might try Louis out at the bottom some of the more difficult ones, such as the Colombian political ones. I'll stick with the geology. Louis is in Colombia and Louis Castro speaks fluent Spanish. I suppose the main. Well, one question of course is that's coming up. I'm looking at the screen is the applications. Louis, can we talk about?
Yes
Where they stand?
Yeah, absolutely. I know, I mean, I don't think there's any secret there. The applications are also taking a bit more time than anticipated. In large part that's due to a change in government. Colombia had an election and there was a change in government regime some two months ago. As is usual when new governments come in, decisions tend to get frozen and that's common in government as well as in more developing countries. There has been a hiatus in the consideration of the applications. We are still pushing hard.
We do that not just here in Bogotá with the central mining agency, but also locally in Corantioquia, which is the local authority that deals with mining matters in which is where Anzá is situated. The point to make here is that we don't have any reason to think that these will not be granted. We've done everything that needs to be done. We've filled in everything that needs to be done. More importantly, the license areas we have are vast. There is a surfeit of targets to look at and to go for before we do much work on those license applications. Yes, it would be better had we received them, but would it actually change the amount of work and the nature and the location of that work? The answer is highly unlikely.
Brad might like to comment, but I believe if that slowdown in the applications coming through would not impact the company. Brad, do you want to add anything on that?
You know, it's disappointing. We had done a lot of work moving those applications forward and the main event that needs to happen is the public audience. But the Corantioquia and the local secretaría arrange a series of public meetings with the local communities to not vote. There's no veto. But just to explain the process and generally speaking, they're quite happy. You know, our leases cross what, four different municipalities, mostly Anzá. Anzá is extremely friendly to mining by and large as a result of the good work done by our team there over the years and carried on by Agnico to just carry out the social programs.
Surrounding areas are not so friendly, but they just get behind the corners here and there. That would all been planned and then, as Louis said, a new government came in. Colombia is slightly odd, well not odd, but it's a South American issue is that a lot of the key bureaucratic jobs are political. Not like the U.K. where they're civil servants for life. The head of this and the head of that and the head of so and so forth are become appointed and they're new ones. These new appointees decided that they wanted to put everything on hold until they began to get a bit of feel for things.
There was a bit of a few. I won't say missteps, but there were a few new government comes in full of bright ideas. They get pushed back. A lot of companies, not just, in fact most, Julian, most exploration companies have essentially stopped work in Colombia requesting greater communication, greater guidance, greater understanding of what exactly is going on. I think that message has been received and from what we understand is that they're, you know, they're now becoming a little bit more communicative than they have in the past.
It's just a little bit of a, I won't say a protest, but a little bit of saying, "Hang on guys, we need to know what the hell's going on." One of Louis' jobs these few days is to talk to the vice minister and just again to express our interest in going forward, describe who we are and so just let them know that what, you know, the impacts are of the bureaucratic machine becoming a bit clogged up. It's just that, you know, just presenting our case in a very polite way. As Louis said, yeah, we have no knowledge of that not going ahead. It's just.
There has to be that sort of feeling of finding their feet, as it were, which is sadly the way politics works in South America. As Louis said, I think, you know, we understand the applications. We can work, we can do mapping and sampling and we've gone all over those things. We just can't drill. You know, we've mapped and sampled everything, and as a result of that have got a pretty good idea of where the key areas are, and the key areas are on the eastern side which have been granted. Yes, we would love to have had them granted, but it hasn't happened. That's not at this time causing any great slowdown in drilling. There are other issues at play that.
Yeah
Are causing the slowdown.
No, thanks, Brad. Just to add from my point of view, we are totally in bed with the right partners here. Newmont and Agnico have got a great record in delivering projects in these somewhat difficult jurisdictions as these things become. The joint venture has still got another potentially 14 years to run, so there's a lot of time to claw back stuff that may get delayed a bit. I would say the concerns of the government are those you would expect, you know, environmental concerns, community formalization. All those sorts of things we're already addressing and Nick already addressed.
In part, I'm going to see the Minister of Mines to say, "Look, this is the effect they're gonna have if you don't listen to what we're saying." We are expecting them to listen and so we're gonna tell them. We're gonna tell them what it is. That, you know, it is responsible mining that we're carrying out and responsible exploration. As Brad says, they are very much listening. They did reverse something they had intended to bring in by way of tax changes. That hasn't now happened. We're expecting some movement certainly on the applications in the next few weeks and months. We will obviously let you know if things change.
In the meantime, plenty of work to do on the licenses themselves.
Now, I've got another question here, Brad, and I think you've addressed it in part in the presentation, which is playing on people's minds, which is how long are these negotiations gonna go on, and is there a deadline to those? Well, the 90 days that we did have in the original agreement was something that everybody was intending to keep to under the previous rules that were in place. Because that's changed, as Brad explained, it is gonna take a bit longer. There's two sets of things happening here in parallel. One is actually setting up the joint venture company, and the other one is agreeing the constituent documents of that company.
Setting up the company will take a few months, and the reason for that, to make it a tax-efficient transfer of assets. Secondly, to ensure that we don't fall foul of having to go to ask for permissions, if you like, from government to get these things transferred, which would delay things. The route to be followed is well understood, but it will take a few months to do. It involves setting up a new co. and a new company in Colombia, and then spinning off the assets that we have currently in the existing company here in Colombia. That will take several months, a few months to do. The negotiations will carry on the constituent documents that I mentioned earlier. Those are progressing.
We have made some proposals. As Brad said, not surprisingly, Minera Monte Águila were wanting to change some of the specifics here. I guess in part to address some of the uncertainty that's been caused currently by the political scenario. The political scenario is relatively short term. These things will settle down. We're pushing back. We will come to an agreement. When that agreement does come through, that is when the $2 million payment will be triggered, so we're not gonna have to wait months and months. We're still on schedule, potentially. We're getting this to the end of January. It may slip.
The important thing to note is we're sitting on $2.5 million of cash on the balance sheet with a partner that has to pay for all the exploration in Colombia, and we control the rate of expenditure in Brazil and Argentina. To the extent that, you know, are we reliant and do Agnico and Newmont have much leverage? Well, the reality is that we can, you know, string it out a few weeks if we have to. They wanna get on, they wanna get the agreement done. They're very keen on these assets. These assets don't come about very often that are at a relatively good stage in terms of results. Although these immediate results just have been a bit more disappointing. That's part of exploration.
We will get back to having strong results, and I expect there'll also be weaker results in the future. It's just part and parcel of trying to identify precisely where these ore bodies are. We're in bed with the right guys for all of this.
If I could, yeah, maybe just expand at one or two things is that there were two separate things. There was agreeing to the structure and then there's doing the structure. Even though it might take months to do the structure, once you've agreed it, we carry on working. Technically speaking, September the 7th, phase one agreement ceased to exist. Now, we were entirely within our rights, "Okay, boys, vacate the premises. You know, you no longer have right of access. Go away until this is resolved." We said, "No, no. We want you to carry on." We've given them dispensation to keep working and we keep rolling it forward. That's entirely within our gift. In terms of what leverage we have, yeah, we have some.
I mean, we could say to them, "Okay, bugger off." I mean, you know, "Until you sign the agreement, you... We don't want you on site." That's not helpful, but it's you know, we do have some ammunition, some negotiating clout here. The issues are we have an agreement that Newmont and Agnico signed back in 2018, and if they want to make changes, then they have to, one, explain what's changed their mind, why they suddenly want a change. Two, you know, what's in it for us. We're very cognizant of not giving away things in the longer term that could be quite substantial. I'll just address another question that was asked earlier about what phase three is. Phase three is quite complicated. Phase two is reasonably straightforward. They own 51% now.
If they don't proceed to phase II or we don't come to agreement, that flips back to we become majority shareholder. If they progress through phase two, then they've earned 65% and they have the right to move to phase III, which they earn another 10% by doing a DFS. Now, the question there is, well, what happens then is that and there was some wording in the agreement that how do we then protect our interest on that final 25%? That to us is the key point, is that, you know, we hope that this is successful and moves forward and we get 25, and then we want to be able to protect our position.
It's the wording of phase III and some issues there. You know, I think we're negotiating. We're not calling each other names or pointing fingers or squabbling. You know, we're just doing it in a grown-up fashion, but it's complicated and, as Luke said, we don't want to make a mistake. Every clause or every modification proposed can have all number of unintended consequences. We think, you know, we've got to go away and think about all these things and you just can't react quickly, otherwise, you know, you could be bit on the bum quite severely. It's all in good faith and we're all carrying on, but it's just business and we can't rush.
I'm just going through some more questions. I'll just jump to a technical one that someone's here noted about what's happened to some of the reassays or high-grade results. There's probably just a bit of a rock story. We've made mention in the past about why some of the drilling results over the last couple of years have been delayed and that's due to the need to re-assay. They all get re-assayed and the results are issued. What happens is that for gold assays, we use what we call fire assay. I won't explain what that means. You can go and Google it. The normal fire assay has a top limit of 10 grams per ton.
We put everything into assay. It takes weeks to get the numbers back and then, you know, a lot of them come back over assay, you know. Obviously that's a good thing. We like high grade. That means they've got to be put back in again for just a slightly different finish to the assay. They come back and they could be 11, they could be 100. That's why, you know, we've had a lot of these high grade things, which is good, but it means that when they come back and we see anything, oh, here we go, we've got to put them back in and get them reassayed. When we finally do announce the assays, they do include the high grade reassays. That's why they take a bit longer.
It's just part of geochemistry and it's not a problem that most companies face, but we do because we've got lots of holes over 10 grams. It's just the nature of the beast.
I've got a comment here on the phase two, how long that could take. Well, phase II is, as we said, Brad said, $20 million to be spent over 4 years. The reality is that once these guys start to drill, they do tend to get through it a little more quickly. We have been expecting MMA, Minera Monte Águila, to be spending well in excess of what would it be? $5 billion a year. One would expect, you know, easily they could expend twice that much. Do I think it's gonna take 4 years once we kick off? No, I don't. I think it'll be a lot quicker than that once we resume operations.
They can speed that up significantly if that's what's needed, depending on the results.
A question for me. Could the company be set up a long time ago? Yeah, the answer is no. One, the devising a new structure is not simple. The actual discussion, the examination, the research to determine the structure is not a simple task. It's not a cheap task. You know, there are lots of lawyer time involved and lawyers aren't cheap. We were not prepared to invest tens of thousands of USD in legal fees determining a structure until, you know, Agnico and Newmont had said, "Yeah, we're gonna do this." Until we got the official word in our hand in September saying they're gonna go, you know, we had internal chats amongst ourselves, but ultimately, you know, you need external expert advice and that doesn't come cheap.
Yeah, we're not going to bite the bullet and go to the lawyers until we had confirmation that they are moving forward. Now that we know what's going on, we're not gonna bite the bullet and form the company until we've agreed. You know, or every step costs money, and we're not gonna spend that money until we're absolutely sure that it's being spent for, you know, a legitimate reason. Yes, it would've been nice to do it years ago, but that's not the way that things actually work.
There's a short question here. Are either of the current players interested in El Pantano in Argentina? Well, the answer is they could be. It's probably still too early for them, so they'll let us do the work, which is common in these things. The junior miners go out and do the greenfield, and then we go from there. Yeah, totally usable. Newmont is in there to the north, west of us in Cerro Moro. There are other big players there. Yeah, I mean, they do respect the work that Brad does on the ground there, and we've got a pretty good team down there. We have had discussions with them in the past.
Indeed before we even, I got involved, you know, we were being seen by one of these guys as effectively doing the pilot work ahead of potential involvement. It is possible. There's nothing there for the moment, but it's good to have a seat at the table with these big players who can move when they need to.
One question. What input, if any, do we have in locating the drill rigs at Pepas? That's easy. None. We're trying to change that, and that's one of the things that we might toss into the bucket for negotiation.
It will be.
It's their money, so, you know, they ultimately get the right to decide. Up to this point, there was no provision in the agreement for us to have any input at all. We just get told after the fact where it's going. Now I've, you know, I talked about my view of some of the drilling and, you know, while I'm not saying that they did it badly, they did it differently to what I would do. Part of that is just the imperative of being a big company. I mean, I would do things differently because, you know, Orosur has no money and, you know, we don't need to find 10 million ounces.
My view would be, we would've drilled in a far more conservative way, drilled off to the side, but into the previous hole, made sure we hit it, and then stepped out, where they've just gone, bang, big step out. Now that in part is because they can afford to, which is a nice problem to have. I suppose we could argue that they're trying to test whether this is, you know, 10 million ounce. Now that's probably a legitimate argument I think, but I don't. I'm not overly convinced. I think in...
When every time you drill a hole, particularly in this situation where you're trying to address uncertainty, you design a hole to give you, or to ask a specific question, and then make sure that the hole answers the question, either positively, hits what you want, and says, "Okay, that's good." Or by missing or by giving a negative answer, it then tells you where to go. I think in this case, by attempting to address more than one variable, by trying to address two things, you know, the depth, they've in effect addressed none of them. Yeah, I think we certainly would have put it forward on the table now that we want to now be involved in these discussions as a technical committee.
I don't imagine that they're gonna, you know, we have a right of veto, but certainly we'll put our, you know, slam on the table and say, "Look, we think it's right or wrong or going forward." That was. We had no right to do that. That wasn't in the agreement. We had no ability to force that, but it's something we would like to have written in now. I think going forward we're gonna be a little bit. If we can, we'll be a little bit more vocal in just sort of saying, "What the hell are you doing?" You know, watch this space.
Okay. There's another one here on drilling results. Are you releasing drilling results to the market when you receive them? Well, the answer is, you know, if there is enough material information out there, we are under obligation to release those. There have been extensive delays, as everybody knows, certainly during COVID, being caused at the labs in ALS in Lima, where these things are flown to. When we do have an RNS to release, as Brad says, it does need to go through Agnico, but that does just a 3-day sort of 3-day process. Again, not significant. The answer is yes. When we do have significant results, we do release those to the market.
Should Brad or Louis base themselves in South America? Well, I'm, you know, sure.
Absolutely.
If you wanna pay for it. That'd be lovely, but it's not helpful. I mean. Yes, it would be nice to be there, but the decisions that are being made on the joint venture agreement are not being made in South America. I mean, they're being made in North America. They're being made in Denver and in Toronto. Yes, it would be therapeutic to be able to be there and yell at everybody, but it actually wouldn't be that useful. You know, these decisions at this level on these sorts of projects are made at several rungs above the South American level. You know, we certainly have some contacts there, and we'll continue to have contacts there.
Actually being on the ground, it's more visual. It doesn't actually achieve a great deal. I think at the moment we'll just stay where we are and yell from a distance. You know, we are comfortable. As I said, you know, big companies move at their own pace, and that pace is not what we would do. There are complications. Having two big partners makes it even worse. Agnico have also had some issues recently. They've gone through a couple of major mergers. They merged with Kirkland Lake, which was a massive merger. That's been bedded down. They're currently involved in another merger of Yamana with another company. There's again things to bed down.
I don't know where we stand on the to-do list. Probably not page one, but hopefully top of page two. Things, yeah. You know, I saw another comment earlier or another question about we don't see ourselves mentioned on Agnico or Newmont's news flow, and that's yeah, sorry. That's never gonna happen. Not until they find something huge, because exploration results are almost never published by major companies. They're just not material to the share price. These are massive producers of gold. Drilling a hole in the middle of Colombia is exciting, but it's not gonna move the share price.
They, apart from a one paragraph line in the annual report, you're never gonna see comments about us or about our drilling by those big companies. I think if they had their way, they would like to have no announcements. I think they find our announcements quite annoying because it's giving away information that they would rather not give in a competitive sense, and also potentially for attracting artisanal miners. They see our need to announce as a bit of a necessary evil, which they'd rather do away with. You know, we do what we can, but you'll never see them talking about it.
Two short questions here. Will the new JV company be floated on the LSE? And how worried are you about future funding in the current environment? The first question, the joint venture company, no, I don't expect that to be floated on the LSE. One would float principally for profile as well, but principally funding. The funding of that JV is gonna be through Minera Monte Águila, Agnico and Newmont. No, I expect it will not be floated on the LSE. That wouldn't be one of the plans. In relation to future funding, we do have cash on the balance sheet and these two big players are funding Colombia, so really it's deciding how much we want for Brazil and Argentina.
We're not gonna have any major activity in those two places, as Brad said, certainly not Argentina until the back end of the year, 'cause if we do wanna drill, we'll need environmental impact assessment, and we'll need some permitting to happen. That's gonna take quite a few months. If there is any need for funding, it'll be stuff to go into the ground, and it won't be at the earliest until the end of next year. Frankly, when we receive this $2 million from our partners in Colombia, that also will take off the pressure.
We're in a relatively stable situation, if you like, but the environment is undoubtedly difficult, and I wouldn't like to be facing a, you know, have to go out to the market in the next, you know, 3-4 months. It's not something we need to do.
I think we're done now.
We've just about covered everything.
I think we've covered all the ones that aren't rude. We're
Brad, Louis, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time then, addressing every single question that came in from investors. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. Louis, perhaps before redirecting those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.
Well, first of all, just to say thank you to everybody for coming to participating and coming on. We do like to have these questions. We do like communicating with shareholders, and this is quite an effective way of doing it. Secondly, just say thanks to Brad 'cause he always takes the brunt of all these presentations. I just sit in the background, so I appreciate. I know there's a lot of work going into this beforehand, so thank you, Brad. Look, we're definitely going through a difficult phase with the company right now, but it's difficult for the right reasons. This is an exciting asset. People wanna grab as much of it as they can and negotiate as hard as they can on it.
We have got some protections in there already from the existing agreement, and there will be a negotiation on some parts, but I'm confident that we'll come out with the right result at the end of that time. Precisely when that will be is hard to say, but again, here I am in Colombia today. Let's see what we can progress. They're big companies. They do take a bit longer than we do. There are two sets of lawyers here. There's Bogotá lawyers, and there's Canadian counsel involved as well. Things are moving in the right direction. It's a very good asset to go for and to get the right result on. We're sitting on cash. We don't absolutely have to rush this. We'll do it in the right timeframe.
As soon as we have results and movement in anything material, we will obviously be coming out with information to you all and to the market generally. Thank you very much for attending. I think that's it from me. Again, we will keep you updated as and when things develop.
Louis, that's great, and Brad as well, thank you once again for updating investors this morning.
Pleasure.
Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Orosur Mining Inc., we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good morning to you all.