| COMPANY NEWS
|
CoAL partners with Rio Tinto
July 8, 2008
Johannesburg - Coal of Africa (CoAL) announced on Tuesday it had entered into a joint venture and farm swap agreement with resources giant Rio Tinto.
The coal development company, which has operations in South Africa, said it had concluded a memorandum of understanding with Kwezi Mining and Chapudi Coal, joint venture companies held by the Rio Tinto Group and the Kwezi Group of South Africa.
The parties intend to formalise agreements that would see Chapudi grant access to and cede to CoAL ownership in certain prospecting rights and interests over certain project areas that are contiguous to CoAL's Makhado Hard Coking Coal Project located in Limpopo.
"This is expected to add significant highly prospective acreage to the current project area and improve the economics of the proposed 5 million tonnes per annum mining operation planned to commence in June 2009," CoAL said.
Chapudi and CoAL also intend to enter into a joint venture agreement in respect of prospecting rights over certain farms owned by CoAL and Chapudi in the northern part of Limpopo.
"It has been agreed that Chapudi will be the operator of the joint venture and both companies believe that the area is likely to contain a significant coal resource," CoAL added.
In return for the prospecting rights over farms ceded by Chapudi to CoAL the company has agreed to cede prospecting rights and interests over certain other farms, also located in Limpopo to Chapudi.
CoAL believes this rationalisation of farms provides significant benefits to both companies in terms of bringing the collective properties into commercial production.
"It is very pleasing to bring these discussions to finalisation. CoAL is committed to bringing its Limpopo properties into production in the second half of next year and this agreement certainly contributes to achieving that goal in a very major way," said CoAL managing director Simon Farrell.
The proposed transactions must still be approved by shareholders and is subject to the completion of due diligence by both parties and the granting of approval by the Minister of Minerals and Energy for the transfer and cession of relevant prospecting rights and interests.
|
|
|
Social bookmarking allows users to save and categorise a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. This is different to using your own browser bookmarks which are available using the menus within your web browser.
Use the links below to share this article on the social bookmarking site of your choice.
Read more about social bookmarking at Wikipedia - Social Bookmarking
|
|
|
Related Articles
Company News
News
Markets
Technology News
International
|
