Majescor doubles on pre-earthquake Haitian drill results

Ottawa-based Majescor Resources (MJX-V) has released high-grade gold assays, including 10.5 metres of 77 grams gold per tonne, from drilling completed in December 2009 at its Somine gold-copper project in northeast Haiti.

According to Majescor, “analyses and results were delayed due to the earthquake of January, 2010, in Port-Au-Prince,” though “care has been taken to ensure that the samples were properly stored, accounted and retrieved before shipment to a reputable laboratory facility, Acme Analytical Laboratories of Vancouver, B.C.”

Majescor controls an approximate 65.5% interest in the Somine property through a complicated series of arrangements with its Haitian-American business partners. The owner of the project is a Haitian company named Somine SA, which was mostly controlled by a New York-based investment company, Simact, an investor in tourist resorts, agriculture, banking and mining in Haiti. Majescor has acquired a 100% in Simact’s Montreal-based mining enterprise, Simact Alliance Copper Gold (SACG), which controls around 60% of the voting rights to Somine SA (Majescor later acquired another 5.5% interest privately).

The earthquake did not directly impact the property, according to the company’s regulatory filings on SEDAR, it being located in the northeast corner of Haiti around 250 km drive from the capital Port-au-Prince and the epicenter of the quake. However, one senior employee of Somine SA was killed and most of Somine’s accounting records were lost, hampering progress.

Majescor’s recently reported drill results are from its first-phase, 1,000-metre program in 2009 targeting the Faille B prospect. Prior to that, Faille B last saw drilling in 1987 as part of an exploration campaign carried out by the United Nations, which delineated a small non-National Instrument 43-101-compliant gold resource there.

Of the nine holes Majescor completed to test extensions of the historic zone, a few returned decent grades from an orogenic gold vein ranging from a depth of 20 metres to 102 metres. The best result, 10.5 metres grading 77 grams gold and 0.17% copper, can mostly be attributed to a smaller 1.5-metre section grading 537 grams gold and 0.21% copper. According to a tool called the Drill Hole Interval Calculator created by Exploration Insights newsletter writer and geologist Brent Cook, the remaining 9 metres have a residual grade of just 0.33 gram gold and 0.16% copper. The next best result was 6 metres grading 3 grams gold, starting from a depth of 57.5 metres.

Faille B is within a 10-km-long-by-up-to-3.8-km-wide copper-bearing corridor defined by previous operators through historical regional stream sediment, soil and rock geochemistry sampling, as well as drilling and trenching. The corridor also includes the historic Blondin and Douvray copper-gold zones, for which historical, non-compliant resource estimates exist.

At Blondin, eight holes drilled by the United Nations in the 1970s identified a potential 50 million tons grading 0.56% copper, using a 0.3% copper cut-off grade. Douvray, meanwhile, was tested by about 60 holes from three different operators, including the UN and the German government in the 1970s, and junior explorer St. Genevieve Resources in the 1990s. St. Genevieve estimated the eastern part of Douvray contained 69.4 million tones grading 0.39% copper while the western part contained another 29 million tones grading 0.33% copper.

As for Faille B, it has a non-compliant historical resource of 1.07 million tonnes grading 2.36 grams gold, or 81,196 oz.

Prior to optioning its interest in the Somine project, Majescor explored for uranium in Quebec and for diamonds across several parts of Canada.

The company is led by Daniel Hachey, a former investment banker who joined long-time directors Marc-Andre Bernier and Jacques Trottier as president and CEO in early 2010.

Also on the board are two representatives of Majescor’s Haitian-American business partners. They include Jean-Marie Wolff, a banker and real estate vendor in New York, and Daniel Faustin, a medical doctor from New York with business interests in real estate and tourism in Haiti.

According to Majescor’s technical report, the Somine Property lies within a highly prospective volcanic arc environment, host to numerous epithermal gold and porphyry copper occurrences in Haiti, as well as the world-class Pueblo Viejo gold deposit in the adjacent Dominican Republic joint-owned by Barrick Gold (abx-t, abx-n) and Goldcorp (g-t, gg-n).

The only other active mining junior in Haiti seems to be Colorado-based Eurasian Minerals (emx-v), which controls over 281,000 hectares of prospecting permits in the northwest and northeast. A subsidiary of Newmont Mining (nmc-t, nem-n) took over as operator of the projects earlier this year.

Shares of Majescor rose as high as 29c in intraday trading before closing up 9.5c to 23.5c on heavy volume of 3.22 million shares after the company released its drill results on Aug. 18. There are currently 58 million shares outstanding, 80 million if fully diluted, with a 52-week share price range of 10c-32c.