With phenomenal numbers for Lexington Gold, have they hit the Jackpot?

“…One of the reasons that Lexington has a strong following is that shareholders know that we unlock value by putting the money into the ground. We are not a lifestyle company. Every single cent is turned over three times and we make it work for us…”

Something quite unusual happened on the AIM market this month and Lexington Gold put that down to the confidence of loyal shareholders.

The gold explorer raised funds and did so at a premium to the share price with seventy percent of the existing shareholder base taking part in the company’s £2.5 million equity fundraise and conversion of loans.

“We are extremely fortunate that with Lexington we’ve got a very loyal shareholding base,” says chief executive Bernard Olivier.  “A lot of that comes from previous successes with Aquarius Platinum, and alternate other companies where we’ve returned money to shareholders.”

The board has form for rewarding investors, and the Aquarius Platinum that Olivier references was associated with Lexington’s chairman Edward Nealon who guided that business into the precious silvery-white metal

Lexington’s recent fundraise and model is geared towards proving up reserves and selling assets on.   It’s doing that in the United States where it has upgraded the resource at its Jones-Keystone Loflin project three times, and the first assay results from initial work on the shallow gold Argo asset “looks very promising.”

The bulk of the financing though is going towards the South Africa-based package of concessions created and curated by Mark ‘Mr Midas’ Creasy.  Lexington is accessing his portfolio with the purchase of Creasy’s White Rivers Exploration Ltd.

Creasy not only approached Lexington to buy the business, he loaned a not inconsiderable amount and has no intentions of exiting.  After all he wants to know the outcome of Lexington’s exploration efforts as much if not more than the rest of the shareholders.   Olivier says the portfolio will yield gold at shallow depth. “The numbers seem to be staggeringly big. To be talking about 37 million ounces in the ground for a junior exploration company is really phenomenal.”

“There is a misconception that all gold that’s left in South Africa, which by the way, is calculated to be over to 1.2 billion ounces still is now at extremely deep levels of well over 2000 metres plus, but that is incorrect. And almost all of Mark’s work that he’s done and WRE’s work has focused on gold shallow within about 1000 metres.”

As Bernard tells Sarah Lowther in this interview he is very optimistic that Lexington can convert “these millions of ounces in the ground” into independently assessed JORC compliance resources as the company has done in the Carolinas in the U.S..

Conversion will be done on the most economic terms with Bernard reminding investors that “every single cent is turned over three times and we make it work for us. We unlock value by putting the money into the ground.”