Centamin makes offer for West African gold miner

10th Dec 2013 07:53

- Recommended offer for West African gold miner- Offer price of 22m pounds- Target has 100km of prospective development licencesIn order to dilute its dependence on unstable Egypt, gold miner Centamin has agreed an all-share takeover of Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire-focused Ampella Mining.Australian-listed Ampella is valued at £22.6m (A$40.9m) based on Centamin's offer price, which has been recommended by the Ampella board, but requires 90% shareholder agreement. The acquisition will add to Centamin's development portfolio, with one defined 3.25m ounce resource and extensive licence holdings over what it believes is a highly prospective and underexplored trend of gold mineralization that offers "outstanding potential" for resource growth.Ampella, which has over A$10m cash balances, owns licences over around 2,200 square km of exploration ground in Burkina Faso, including the Batie West gold project and its 3.25m oz Konkera Resource, as well as roughly 1,200 square km of early-stage exploration ground across the border in Cote d'Ivoire. Centamin said it intended to carry out a substantial exploration programme at Batie West to try and significantly increase the resource and ultimately develop a sizeable producing operation.Centamin Chairman Josef El-Raghy said: "This acquisition provides a significant expansion of Centamin's exploration drive and also a first entry into a highly prospective region of Burkina Faso, which in recent years has proven to be a stable and attractive destination for mining investment." He praised Ampella for the significant progress it had made at Batie West, delivering a "high quality and well defined resource" at Konkera. "It is our belief that Ampella's extensive licence holding over a highly prospective and underexplored 100-plus km trend of gold mineralization, offers outstanding potential for further significant growth of the resource base."Centamin offered one of its shares, valued at 44.31p at the close on Monday, for every five of Ampella's, which was a premium of 113% to the Australian company's last closing price of A$0.075.Centamin's shares rose 1.9% to 45.16p in the first few minutes of trading on Tuesday.OH