Gold Fields inks deal with Radius (December 10, 2001)

Vancouver — Already holding a 12% equity stake in Radius Explorations (RDU-V), South African-based Gold Fields (GOLD-Q) has inked a deal with the junior to earn up to a 70% stake in a portion of the Tambor and Bella Vista projects in Guatemala.

The area of interest covers the western 225 sq. km of Radius’s 3,300-sq-km land package in Guatemala. Over the past year, Radius has assessed the grade and geometry of five known gold zones: Sastre, Bridge, Lupita, Valery and TBS. All are situated in a 6-km-long soil geochemical anomaly. The best grades from drilling have come from the Lupita zone, where holes returned 1-2.2 grams gold per tonne. Mineralization occurs as sulphides in a carbonaceous phyllite unit. Two holes drilled into the Bridge zone some 4 km west of the Lupita area intersected anomalous values in volcanic ash cover. Hole 1 then hit the favourable carbonaceous phyllite unit but returned values grading only 0.56 gram gold. Hole 2, collared 100 metres northwest, failed to intersect the promising unit. Earlier, five of the eight holes drilled into the Sastre zone yielded narrow zones of low-grade mineralization occurring in a flat-lying zone in amphibolite-hosted wall rock. Only three of the holes managed to return a grade higher than 1 gram gold per tonne:

– Hole 2 returned 1.3 grams gold over 3.1 metres from 33.5 metres down-hole;

– hole 3 yielded 1.49 grams gold over 6.1 metres from 18.3 metres down-hole; and

– hole 5 cut 1.3 grams gold over 1.5 metre from 10.7 metre down-hole.

The major can earn a 55% interest by spending US$5 million over 3.5 years, plus an additional 15% by funding a bankable feasibility study.

Radius, which has $3 million in working capital, intends to focus on exploring its surrounding properties.