The Market Wire news service is reporting a Canadian resource company, Morumbi, has signed an agreement to be the development partner of choice for a Bougainvillian landowner company, Isina Resource Holdings.
Isina says it represent 15 villages and their traditional land and it is reported Morumbi paid K10,000 (@ US$4,000) on signing the agreement and will pay a further K3,000 every month to Isina.
The agreement means Morumbi will be the first foreign company to explore for mineral resources on Bougainville since the bitter civil war sparked by disputes over the Panguna gold and copper mine.
Morumbi describes Bougainville as ‘one of the worlds best endowed gold and copper districts; largely unexplored since the 1960’s discovery of Panguna’.
Market Wire says this is the first time in the history of Bougainville that an area, ‘until recently aggressively opposed to mineral exploration’, has formed its own development company and invited a foreign partner to jointly explore for and develop mineral resources located on their traditional lands.
The Company’s Chairman Stephen Shefsky and Chief Executive Officer Mark Brennan participated in the signing ceremony which took place at Tunania village on the Isina Lands on the east coast of Central Bougainville.
The current LOI covers approximately 5,000 hectares that extends from the East coast up over and beyond the Crown Prince Range. Bougainville, although long regarded as having great gold and copper potential based on early work done by German explorers, has a unique history with respect to Mining in that no exploration has been carried out since the 1960’s.
Satellite imagery, together with the results of a German Government sponsored Aeromag and geochemical survey over Bougainville carried out by the Federal Institute of Geoscience and Natural Science Hannover and published in 1990, together with the 2007 discovery of extensive alluvial fields in the creeks and rivers of Isina that are now being worked by villagers, single out this area for high-priority exploration programs for gold/copper epithermal and porphyry deposits.
About Morumbi
Morumbi Oil & Gas Inc. is a public company with light oil exploitation opportunities in northwest Alberta, and, through its recent acquisition of Rockwell, it is actively undertaking programs to develop existing assets and conducting activities to acquire additional high impact Oil/Gas and Mineral assets – http://www.morumbi.ca.
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