Brett Richards, CEO and executive director of Pasofino Gold Ltd. EFRGF, was recently a guest on Benzinga's All-Access.
Pasofino Gold is a Canadian mining company laser-focused on building out its 400 million ounce Dugbe Gold Project in Liberia. The company is in the process of updating its feasibility study, which was done three years ago, and expects it to be completed in no more than nine months. A lot has changed since then. Gold prices have more than doubled, which Richards says should result in much better economics out of the new feasibility study.
Simultaneously, Pasofino will also work to get all its permitting done with an eye toward obtaining a Class A mining license by next year. Gold production at Dugbe should commence in two and a half to three years, says Richards.
00:00Brett, thank you so much for being here today. How are you?
00:09I'm great, Kevin. How are you doing today?
00:12I'm doing good. I'm excited for this interview. How's it going? What's going on?
00:17Yeah, Pasifino. Yeah, I think the last time we chatted, we had a number of things on our plate.
00:25Today, we have a very clear focus on a way forward to update our project.
00:32And for those of you who don't know, we have a gold project, 4 million ounce gold project in Liberia that has a feasibility study done.
00:40And now we're in the process of updating it. And hey, our goal is to get this into production as soon as possible.
00:47That's awesome. So could you give us and the viewers who may have not seen you on the last few oil accesses a little bit of an overview of your company?
00:55Yeah, absolutely. So Pasifino is traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol VEIN.
01:01We've had a very bumpy ride over the last kind of six to eight months.
01:06But we have 100% of the Duke Bay Gold Project in Liberia.
01:11And it's a 4 million ounce gold project, open pit mine with a bankable feasibility study done.
01:18But that study was done in 2022. And over the next six, seven months, I'm going to update that study.
01:24We're going to get this through project financing. We're going to get this into construction.
01:28And away we go. We're probably two and a half to three years away from gold production.
01:34And this is a really exciting entry point, a really exciting story right now.
01:40That's great. So that sort of leads to my next question.
01:42Could you tell us about that Duke Bay Gold Project in Liberia and what expectors should be expecting in 2025?
01:49Yeah. So in 2025, we're going to update the feasibility study to to a normal kind of bankable status.
01:59And the reason we have to do that is because the operating expenses and the capital expenses are are three years dated.
02:06So we'll update that. Plus, we used a sixteen hundred dollar gold price when we did the feasibility study three years ago.
02:14So today, the gold price is double that. So we had stellar economics out of the last feasibility study.
02:22I think we're going to see just just really, really great economics come out of this study.
02:28So it is something that will take us about nine months to do.
02:33All our permitting will be done in that period of time.
02:36And we'll we'll be sitting here next year, come with with a class A mining license and a construction decision to to get building this.
02:45Wow, that's amazing. So what makes Liberia so important to the larger gold conversation?
02:51You know what? I don't talk about this enough.
02:54And I have been in this business over thirty five years.
02:57I've built four mines in Africa in very difficult jurisdictions now.
03:03So I've built mines in the Congo and Burkina and Mali and Sierra Leone.
03:08Liberia is probably the greatest and safest jurisdiction to do business in in Africa.
03:14And I put it up against anything.
03:17The mines department, the government are so supportive of build of builders of businesses and mining companies to come in.
03:25And and and they work with us to to build a proper business there.
03:30And then that's a little bit unusual in Africa.
03:33But in Liberia, it's really, really strong.
03:37And so very supportive.
03:39Great country, strong U.S. presence, big U.S. embassy, trades in U.S. dollars.
03:46And they they speak English.
03:49Wow, that's that's very great, important stuff right there.
03:52And as a gold trader myself, I had no clue about that in Liberia.
03:55So thank you for that.
03:56Could you think you could tell us a little bit about the cooperation and support agreement between Hummingbird PLC and Ioko Resources?
04:05Yeah, absolutely.
04:08Hummingbird Resources was a London listed company and they recently got restructured.
04:14And they're now owned by a West African bank called Corus Bank.
04:18And trust me, it is very good to have a bank as your major shareholder and a partner in all of this.
04:24So we sat down and we basically said, what's the framework to work together, both on strategic activities?
04:33What do we need to do to create long term sustainable value?
04:37What do we need to do to put this money into construction and ultimately into production?
04:40And we agreed on that.
04:42And then we agreed on a funding protocol whereby they are going to fund pro rata share of of the funding required for the next two years.
04:51And then we both agreed just at a really good protocol that since we're aligned to get this mine into production,
05:00we will have a standstill agreement whereby, you know, I won't sell the company and they won't make an offer for the company.
05:07And collectively, this is a this is a project that's going to generate when it's at full capacity, three or four hundred million dollars a year of free cash flow.
05:18And we're trading today at a dollar market cap.
05:22So there's significant uncoupling of our valuation to to our inventory and to our potential free cash flow in three years time.
05:33So so our partner has said, we will work with you to to unlock that value and we will participate in project financing.
05:42So they've made it very, very I wouldn't say easy.
05:47What they've made it is very simple to understand as we move forward as a partnership for the market to say, hey, you know what?
05:54This is completely de-risk here in a great jurisdiction and a really big resource.
05:58Wow, that's great. So it sounds like they didn't really make it easy, but they sort of streamlined it for us.
06:04So that's great. So do you mind? Lastly, why is gold still so important in today's market with the whole crypto people talking Bitcoin?
06:13But in my opinion, I love gold. What are your thoughts?
06:18Well, hey, it is a you know, it's a it has been a natural hedge against inflation for for decades.
06:24And I think when when people want to go to safety and let's face it, the last couple of years have been probably the most volatile in this world, whether that's geopolitical instability, whether.
06:37Political turn turnarounds and turnover, the result of the US election, it's wide sweeping, you know, foreign policy out of the US.
06:45It really destabilizes the economy. Look what the Dow has done.
06:50Look what the markets have done in the last two months based on the trade wars and the tariff threats.
06:56And that has has investors nervous because, you know, this volatility is certainly not what they look for in most cases.
07:05So they go to gold and we can we've seen gold perform in this very tumultuous time last year on a US dollar based gold went up 26 percent so far this year of 21 percent.
07:18So if the gold prices has almost doubled from the this time last year.
07:23So naturally, that's where people are going to.
07:27Yes, there are other applications or other, you know, instruments that that give you leverage to gold.
07:33But, you know, the hard physical is is is what people, you know, flock towards and ETFs.
07:40And if you want leverage to that, if you want leverage to the gold play, you come in, you come into the gold equity space like Pasifino.
07:47Wow, that's great. Brett, I can't thank you enough for your time today.
07:52What a great summary of your company.
07:53It sounds like you guys have a lot of great milestones that you're going to be hitting in the next six to 12 months.
07:58I'm really excited. Hopefully we have you on again soon.
08:02Yeah, I really, really look forward to it. This is going to be a really exciting six months.
