Curator to bid for Royal County

Vancouver Lundin-led International Curator Resources (IC-V) plans to make an offer to acquire all the shares of Royal County Minerals (RMI-V).

According to the deal, Curator will deliver a takeover bid by March 15 to Royal County shareholders at an exchange ratio of 4 Curator common shares for each Royal County share. The deal is subject to due diligence and regulatory approvals.

In addition to the takeover, Ron Netolitzky, is slated to join Curator’s Board of Directors. Netolitzky is credited with the discovery of Barrick’s Eskay Creek mine.

Curator and Royal County make an ideal match," said Rick Bailes, president of International Curator. "Bringing Lucas Lundin and Ron Netolitzky together provides us with a powerful team to assess and develop Canadian gold projects. We will continue to add to our portfolio with the objective of building on of Canada’s leading gold exploration companies."

The Lundin’s manage a group of publicly traded resource companies and have been responsible for a number of discoveries including the Bajo de la Alumbrera copper-gold deposit and the Valedero deposit, in Argentina.

Curator’s major asset is its Assean Lake gold project in Manitoba which is a joint venture between Curator (60%) and Rare Earth Metals (REM-V) (40%). Assean Lake is a shear-hosted gold target that is associated with a gold-enriched sulphide iron formation. With Curator as the operator, the partners recently kicked off a 4,500 metre drill program that is designed to test new targets that lie on strike with the Hunt, B-52 and BIF gold zones. These targets were defined in geophysical and geochemical surveys conducted last summer.

The company also holds the GJ gold-copper project in northwestern British Columbia which is adjacent to Royal County’s Kinaskan property. GJ hosts a gold-rich porphyry copper system that hosts drill intercepts that average up to 1.9 grams gold per tonne and 0.70% copper over 68 metres. The neighboring Kinaskan property covers 130 sq. km and hosts 16 known mineral occurrences as well as a number of gold, copper and silver stream sediment and soil anomalies. A drill intercept at the Gordon vein cut 2.5 metres averaging 19.9 grams gold per tonne.

Also in Royal County’s stable are projects such as the Bob Creek gold-silver prospect near Houston, BC., and the QCM gold property situated 250 km northwest of Prince George.

At the Bob Creek property previous drilling on a series of quartz-feldspar porphyry dykes and hydrothermal breccias returned up to 69.0 grams gold and 13.03 grams silver over 6.1 metres, and 3.25 grams gold and 30.89 grams silver over 21.75 metres. In addition, several longer lower grade drill intercepts (up to 156.1 metres grading 0.79 gram gold and 10.29 grams silver), point to the bulk tonnage potential of the property.

The QCM property hosts a 300-by-130 metre gold-in-soil anomaly that averages 600 ppb gold. Limited drilling at the target intercepted gold mineralization that included a 36.5-metre section that averaged 1.31 grams gold and a 27.4-metre section that averaged 1.0 gram gold.

The board of directors of Royal County fully support, International Curator’s takeover bid and believe that the merged company will be able to finance the continuing exploration of the Kinaskan Lake property and Curator’s adjacent GJ property.