Anglo Swiss digging for diamonds in NWT

Anglo Swiss Resources (ASW-V) is building a diamond portfolio out of scraps.

The Vancouver-based junior believes the staking rush made by majors in the 1990s made for hasty exploration and huge potential for junior companies who know how to pick through discarded claims.

“The rationale in the ’90s was to disprove properties as quickly as you could,” says Anglo Swiss director Chris Robbins, “a lot of properties were just looked at in a periphery way.”

In the past year Anglo Swiss has been on a big push to take advantage of the situation.

It has acquired 160,000 acres in the Lac de Gras area of the Northwest Territories, an area that has thus far produced BHP Billiton‘s (BHP.N, BLT.L) Ekati diamond mine and Rio Tinto‘s (RTP.N, RIO.L) Diavik diamond mine.

Robbins is bullish on both Anglo Swiss’ Fry Inlet property and the recently acquired MS property. Fry Inlet is 25 km from Ekati and MS is 25 km from Diavik.

At Fry Inlet, drilling is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2006. Kennecott Canada Exploration drilled four holes on the property in 1997 and discovered 14 macrodiamonds and 46 microdiamonds in 281 kg of kimberlite.

While the results weren’t enough for Kennecott, Robbins is confident that with improved technology those numbers will only go up.

“Once you find diamonds, you’ll find more diamonds,” Robbins says.

Anglo Swiss acquired the Fry Inlet Diamond property in two transactions in June of this year. It consists of 42 connecting mineral claims.

In a press release issued on Thursday, Anglo-Swiss says the property has not been properly explored by modern technology and that it contains eight geophysical anomolies. Also, the release says, it is prospective because there are unresolved indicator mineral trains, possibly indicating the presence of undiscovered kimberlites.

The MS property was acquired from

Impala Resources, a Vancouver-based private company. Anglo Swiss gave Impala 2 million shares and $50,000 for the 52,000-acre claim.

A private placement will be closing on Nov. 30 to help fund drilling at MS. The placement is for a minimum of 600,000 and a maximum of 1.2 million units. Units will be offered at 60 per unit. Each unit will consist of five flow-through shares and one common share. Attached to the common share is a two-year warrant, which can be converted to a share at 22.

In Toronto on Thursday, Anglo Swiss shares were trading at 8.5 on 140,000 shares.

Robbins says 2005 has been a year of reinvention for Anglo Swiss as the company has gone from focusing on gold mines in British Columbia to acquiring prospective diamond properties in NWT.

“We are the most undervalued junior trading on the market,” Robbins says.