Rockfire Resources announces that it has successfully completed a placing of new ordinary shares in the Company, raising net proceeds of £1,000,000. These funds provide the Company with significant financial strength to ensure a continuity of deep drilling, should a main gold zone be intersected at the Company's 100% owned Plateau Gold Deposit ("Plateau"), part of the Lighthouse tenement in North Queensland, Australia.
Highlights
· Successful raise of £1,050,075, through a placing of 64,620,000 new ordinary shares of 0.1p each in the Company (the "Placing Shares") at an issue price of 1.625 pence per Placing Share (the "Placing")
· The Placing Shares are being issued at a price of 1.625 pence per Placing Share, in-line with the Volume Weighted Average Price ("VWAP") for the ten day period prior to this announcement of 1.628 pence. The Company will not be issuing any warrants in connection with the Placing.
· The Placing Shares will represent approximately 7.91 per cent. of the enlarged issued share capital of the Company and have been subscribed for by a combination of new investors and existing shareholders.
· The net proceeds of the Placing provide the Company sufficient funding to expand its drilling programme at Plateau, should a main gold mineralised zone be encountered in the current drilling programme. The Company remains a focussed, results-driven explorer, and proceeds from the Placing ensure that the Company has funding in place to target a large gold mineralised system.
David Price, Chief Executive of Rockfire, said: "The Company has the philosophy that if our exploration proves successful and a main gold mineralised zone similar to Mt Wright is intersected, we would wish to expand our drilling at an accelerated rate. These funds provide an opportunity for Rockfire to either drill more holes at depth, or to engage multiple drilling rigs to drill simultaneously."
"Our diamond drilling program continues at the anticipated pace and budgeted rate. Drilling conditions are very good and core recovery is excellent. I will stress that there is a time-consuming process of core orientation, geotechnical and geological logging, core photography, sample interval selection, cutting and sampling to go through even before the samples are sent to the laboratory. In this light, it will still be at least 2 weeks until the first drill hole is sent to the laboratory and then a further 2-3 weeks before results are received.
"I wish to thank Allenby Capital once again for a successful placing. Our shareholders continue to support our ambitions and I extend a welcome to new shareholders. We look forward to providing you with on-going updates on our drilling activity and the ensuing assay results."
The Company is currently drilling Stage 2 of our planned drilling programme. This consists of 1,664 metres of diamond drilling in 6 drill holes. This phase is expected to take between two and three months.
Stage 3 comprises reverse circulation drilling of 1 drill hole, for approximately 251 metres, expected to take approximately one week and diamond drilling of 1 drill hole, for 779 metres, expected to take between one and two months.
Additional stages will be planned during Phase 2 and will largely be reliant on the results of this phase. Options available to the Company include:
· additional deep drill holes (should results from Phase 2 prove encouraging)
· engagement of additional drilling rigs to increase the pace of drilling, or
· to infill the existing mineralised envelope to improve confidence in an updated JORC gold resource.
Should the Company obtain positive results from the drill programme detailed above, Rockfire will look to increase its drilling at Plateau, to continue an aggressive and determined drilling project.
The Company is also planning to complete magnetometer surveys at Copperhead and Copper Dome, with a view to identifying targets for reverse circulation drilling.