Senior execs to leave Gabriel Resources

The chief financial officer, general counsel, and three board members including the company’s former chief executive are leaving Gabriel Resources (GBU-T, GBRRF-O), the company announced today.

Alan Hill, Britt Banks and Randy Engel are stepping down from the board of directors with immediate effect, the company said. Hill retired as Gabriel’s chief executive officer in March 2009, while Banks and Engel originally joined the board as nominees of Newmont Mining (NMC-T, NEM-N), one of Gabriel’s largest shareholders.

Richard Young and Frank Wheatley, Gabriel’s vice president and chief financial officer and general counsel respectively, will be leaving within the next four months to pursue other interests.

Gabriel’s president and chief executive, Keith Hulley, said that the company was “well positioned to assemble a new management team that will develop Rosia Montana into one of the most efficient and environmentally sound mines in the world.”

“It has been five years [at Gabriel] and I came on with Alan Hill,” Young told The Northern Miner. “We’ve worked together for twenty years and with his retirement it’s a different place.”

Young also said the job was a big time commitment and that he spent half of his time in Romania. He also said that with a new chief executive, it was “appropriate that he bring in a new team.”

“Hulley is doing a great job of running things while the search is underway but it’s difficult to get the kind of candidate that is needed without visibility that the project is moving forward and will be permanent,” Young noted. “Once the permitting process restarts, which we think will be early next year, it will clear the way for the board to bring in its preferred candidate and develop this world-class asset.”

Young said he was optimistic about the future of Romania as a mining jurisdiction. “Five years from now Romania is going to be a very mining friendly place and it’s very prospective geologically but being the first in is always challenging and takes time.” He added that the company had “built up momentum” over the course of the last year and has made progress with the various ministries involved in the permitting process.

“We believe from a technical perspective the various ministries involved in the permitting process understand how well designed the project is,” he said. “So once the government gives it the go-ahead to restart the permitting process we would hope that it would move forward fairly quickly.”

News of the departures comes after Gabriel announced on Nov. 11 that a strategic investor — BSG Capital Markets — part of the Beny Steinmetz Group, was buying 30 million units of Gabriel at $2.25 per unit for $67.5 million.

The Beny Steinmetz Group is a privately owned holding company with global assets in natural resources, real estate, capital markets and diamonds. The group’s mining arm, BSG Resources, operates in Africa and Eastern Europe, including Macedonia and Kosovo, where it owns ferronickel mining and smelting operations.

The Rosia Montana project lies within the Golden Quadrilateral, which is situated within the Apuseni and Metaliferi Mountains of Transylvania, Romania, and covers an area of about 900 sq. km immediately to the north of the city of Deva.

In mid-afternoon trading Gabriel was trading up 5.5% or 21¢ at $4.01 per share with 2.5 million shares exchanging hands.

The company has a 52-week trading range of 99¢-$3.94 per share and has 307.3 million shares outstanding.