Chesapeake Retains Financial Advisor

Canadian gold and silver miner Chesapeake Gold, whose Metates gold project is in Mexico, has retained a financial advisor. The company could listen to acquisition offers from large miners after finalizing its feasibility studies, says president Randy Riefel. “We are not anxious to sell and are not proactively marketing the company for sale. We will advance the Metates project to feasibility, providing an opportunity for people to look at it,” he says, adding that this could take over a year. Riefel declines to name the financial advisor. “The pre-feasibility study should be ready in late 2011 and the full feasibility study will take all of 2012,” he explains, adding that Metates will require $3 billion to build. “Major mining companies are looking to replace their reserves and there are only a handful of projects like Metates. The best thing we can do is further de-risk and add value to the project’s fundamentals. At that stage, a number of major mining companies would be interested in evaluating Metates,” Riefel says. Chesapeake Gold, which trades on the TSX, has a market cap of CAD408m.