Aquiline offered $100,000 to end suit

Vancouver — With the rising stakes at the Navidad property in Chubut province, Argentina, IMA Exploration (imr-v) appears to be getting more anxious to settle what it is calling an annoying lawsuit filed by Toronto-based Aquiline Resources (AQI-V). In the latest twist to the ongoing legal wrangling over who owns the Navidad property, IMA is offering Aquiline $100,000 for the “nuisance value” of Aquiline’s lawsuit filed in British Columbia last March.

“We have offered Aquiline a nuisance value sum to put this nonsense behind us,” Joseph Grosso, president and CEO of IMA, states.

IMA says it is making the offer because it would rather focus its efforts on developing Navidad than waste its time and energy on dealing with an opportunistic lawsuit.

In the suit, Aquiline contends that IMA used confidential regional exploration data supplied by Newmont Mining (NEM-N), the former owner of the Calcatreu property. Newmont acquired Calcatreu through its takeover of Normandy Mining.

IMA is alleged to have used that regional information to stake a 100-sq.-km area surrounding what became the Navidad Hill discovery, some 40 km away, shortly thereafter. IMA ended up not pursuing the Calcatreu project, which Aquiline then purchased from Newmont in a deal announced in January 2003.

Grosso says Aquiline’s claim has no merit, but Aquiline is determined that the trial, scheduled for Oct. 11, will proceed.

“I think Mr. Grosso has his holidays mixed up,” said Marc Henderson, Aquiline’s president and chief executive. “He must have thought it was April Fool’s Day, not Valentine’s Day. We’re fighting about an asset that might be worth a billion dollars.”

IMA announced the discovery of high-grade silver mineralization at Navidad in February 2003. The company has been aggressively exploring the property ever since with great success despite the legal dispute. The drilling has defined an indicated resource of 268 million oz. silver and 1.1 million tonnes of lead, contained in 80.8 million tonnes grading 103 grams silver per tonne and 1.45% lead (at a 50-gram-per-tonne silver cutoff).

The companies have been duking it out since October 2003, when IMA sued Aquiline for damages after IMA claimed Aquiline had thwarted its financing attempts by publicly throwing into question what had prompted IMA’s staking of Navidad.

Meanwhile, Aquiline has fast-tracked Calcatreu. The company increased the resources and completed an independent scoping study last October. The study looked at a series of open pits in the Vein 49 and Nelson deposits. The company is considering a 2,000- tonne-per-day operation that would produce 97,000 oz. gold and 580,000 oz. silver a year during the first four years of a 7-year mine life, at cash costs of US$191 an oz. and an internal rate of return of 20%. Indicated resources are pegged at 6.2 million tonnes grading 3 grams gold and 28 grams silver per tonne.