Philippine panel rules in favor of Philippine Metals

Philippine Metals (PHI-V) looks to have put an exploration permitting nightmare behind it.

The company had been stalled on exploring its prospective Malitao property in the Philippines due to a challenge to the permit issued last September.

Good news, however, has come to the company by way of a panel of arbitrators from the regional Mines and Geosciences Bureau. The panel has rejected an objection against the exploration permit.

The panel ruled that Philippine Metals as the rightful title holder of the Malitao EPA under Philippine law and that the adverse claim was without merit.

“This has been a frustrating and unforeseen experience for our Company,” Marshall Farris, President of Philippine Metals said in a statement. “We will now work diligently with the Mines and Geosciences Bureau to push forward the remaining application and approval process for the granting of our Malitao exploration permit.”

The Company already has signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the local community and has received sign off from the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.

The objection to the exploration permit came in September of last year, at a time when its shares were testing the 52¢ mark. After the news of the challenge was released, however, the shares began a steady slide and by July of this year they were trading in the 9¢ range.

In Toronto on July 27, the day the news was released, the company’s shares showed some of their former strength as news of the ruling sent them up 90% or 8¢ to 17¢ on 818,432 shares traded.

With the exploration permit issue now behind, the company can begin to focus on doing more intense exploration work.

Prior work on the project was done by Philex Mining back in 1969, which reported intersections of massive sulfide between 6 and 20 metres.

The work also identified an 800-metre by 400-metre copper soil anomaly, which remains untested. Previous sampling by Philex identified a continuous section of 93 metres grading 3.5% copper and 0.566 grams gold.

Chip sample results from a property visit done by the company in 2007 yielded metal content ranging from 14.8% to 34% copper, 1.4% to 26.4% zinc, and 1.18 to 1.57 grams gold per tonne.

The property is situated within the Conner-Kabugao Mining District, with known porphyry copper-gold, replacement massive sulphide and epithermal-gold deposits distributed along the margins of a batholitic size Miocene Calc-Alkalic intrusive complex.