Calgary firm seizes golden opportunity in Colombia
With gold reaching new highs, resource investors are looking to the resource-rich and under-explored country of Colombia. But is the political risk too high?
Doug Firby - November 12, 2009
“Nobody,” says Van Den Bussche, “has stepped back and done a systematic exploration for the mother lode.”
For more than three decades, the country has been held back by international attention to its crime problem. But, that situation began to turn in 2002 with the election of reform President Alvaro Uribe. He vowed to make the country more secure, and rolled out a series of business-friendly reforms aimed at increasing government transparency, investing in social welfare and reducing violence in the country. His initiatives have fostered an economic turnaround, with the economy growing by 7.5% in 2007.
All this activity caught the attention of Van Den Bussche and Decker, friends who worked together at Norwest Mine Services Ltd. and continued to get together for occasional lunches and golf games. Over one of those meetings, they started to talk about the opportunities in Colombia, and how its violent history had dampened exploration. They recruited several other long-term associates and started a series of exploratory trips to the country, reviewing about a dozen available properties. Eventually, those travels led to Cisneros.
Convinced they had found a great prospect, they sought out other founding investors to help finance the initial work. The group includes Thibault, Antioquia’s CEO and president, with more than 30 years experience as a mining engineer; geologist John Morgan, CEO of another Calgary company, Infinito Gold Inc.; mining engineers Barry Davies and Don Riva and process engineer John Thomas. Two other key figures are German Guererro, a mining engineer who acts as Antioquia’s country manager and Fernando Jaramillo, an engineer who spent many years with BP Colombia. Collectively, this blue ribbon team has more than 300 years of experience, much of it in South America.
Antioquia was previously known as High American Gold Inc. In July 2008, the company changed its name and merged with the private founding company Am-Ves Resources Inc., legally bringing together the group of 10.
Though mountainous, the Cisneros region is a relatively easy environment to operate in. Its 1,200-plus-metre elevation ensures moderate temperatures and little risk of disease-carrying insects; its proximity to Medellin means it is accessible by paved road; and, thanks to Uribe’s anti-crime initiatives, there’s no need for a machine-gun toting security force. In fact, security is limited to on-the-ground intelligence in the area.
“Ten years ago, it was a whole different country,” says CEO Thibault. Today, he says of the security threat: “That’s gone.”
Perhaps the biggest positive, however, is the supportive and hard-working local community. Decker says local labourers know how to use hand tools and have “a built-in loyalty and work ethic.”
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