VANCOUVER — It’s been over a year since Mario Stifano, president and CEO of Cordoba Minerals (TSXV: CDB; US-OTC: CDBMF) shared an elevator with international financer Robert Friedland and sparked the billionaire’s interest in the San Matias project in northern Colombia.
“It was literally an elevator pitch,” Stifano recalls of the chance encounter during a phone interview with The Northern Miner. “I had 31 floors to tell him about the project … and by the time we reached the top … he loved it.”
The duo finally sealed the deal in early May with the announcement that Friedland’s private exploration vehicle High Power Exploration (HPX) will be entering into a strategic partnership with Cordoba.
HPX will buy 7.3 million units at 14¢ per unit for total proceeds to Cordoba of $1 million. Each unit consists of a share plus a three-year warrant allowing the holder to buy another share for 20¢. If fully exercised, the warrants would bring in another $1.46 million to Cordoba.
Following completion of the private placement, HPX will own 11% of Cordoba, and would own 15.5% on a fully diluted basis.
HPX could also enter into a joint venture to earn up to a 65% interest in San Matias by funding $16.5 million in exploration, and completing a feasibility study.
“It was never an issue for me to raise money or find other partners for the project — I always have multiple irons in the fire,” Stifano says. “It was about finding the right team for the project, and HPX fit the bill. With their leading technologies and expertise, I believe we have a better shot at making history.”
The San Matias property is located 170 km north of the city of Medellin on the northern extension of the Middle Cauca Belt — a north-trending, metal-rich volcanic terrain that saw the lion’s share of Colombia’s exploration activity over the past decade.
One of the biggest discoveries has been the La Colosa gold deposit, 150 km west of the capital Bogota, by AngloGold Ashanti (NYSE: AU) in 2008. The deposit has a JORC-compliant inferred resource of 26.8 million oz. gold grading 0.92 gram gold per tonne in 904.9 million tonnes.
Meanwhile at San Matias, the 200 sq. km property has never seen much in the way of exploration aside from local artisanal miners. Cordoba performed an airborne magnetic survey in 2012, and outlined three prospective structural trends over 13 km in length.
The trends also align with kilometre-long copper-gold anomalies in stream samples and soil geochemical data, which reflect the project’s district-size potential.
“Everywhere we’ve tested, either in soils, trenching or diamond drilling, we’re finding mineralization along the entire length of the trend,” Stifano says, adding that they’ve identified porphyry and skarn-style targets across the property.
Follow-up drilling at Montiel East — one of its many early stage copper-gold porphyry targets — confirmed high-grade mineralization, with intercepts including 101 metres of 1% copper, and 0.65 gram gold per tonne. Recent drilling at the deposit revealed 200 metres at 0.4% copper and 0.33 gram gold.
The results have shown that high-grade mineralization is often associated with magnetite, making it easy to target with higher-resolution geophysical surveys, such as HPX’s proprietary “Typhoon” technology.
“First-cut interpretations of our new ground-magnetic survey suggest that we’ve been drilling only a small finger of a much larger anomaly that opens up to the south and east,” he explains. “And we’re looking forward to seeing how HPX’s technology will outline those targets even further.”
Other prospects on the property include the Costa Azul-Buenos Aires trend, located 3 km south of Montiel East. Cordoba identified a 3.4 km long magnetic high that coincides with extensive stream sediment anomalies up to 1% copper and 1 gram gold.
Follow-up drilling at Costa Azul hit porphyry mineralization and returned 112 metres at 0.4% copper, and 0.32 gram gold, along with 87 metres at 0.6% copper and 0.51 gram gold.
Stifano explains that drilling on the property has been limited to the northern 3 km of the larger prospective trends due to lack in mining title. But he expects exploration will ramp up with the title having been granted this past January. Cordoba also holds an extensive package of applications totalling over 2,000 sq. km.
“We picked up everything we thought was prospective, before anyone else knew there was any significant copper and gold mineralization here,” he says. “So now that we own everything, nobody can come in here … it’s all us.”
Wow, looks very exciting.
what cutoff is used to state your gold resource?