Lucara Diamond completes trial mining at Lesotho project

Tripple-listed Lucara Diamond on Monday said a second auction of diamonds from its Mothae project, in Lesotho, which was held in Antwerp, Belgium, last week, brought to an end the project’s trial mining programme.
 
"The completion of the trial mining programme at Mothae marks a significant milestone in the project's development. We have now sold in excess of 20 000 ct of Mothae diamonds, the results of which would form a solid foundation for revenue modelling in our economic evaluation of the project,” Lucara CEO William Lamb said in a statement.
He added that the information gleaned from the trial mining programme, together with a better constrained geologic and grade model and the processing of unweathered kimberlite, which made up the bulk of the Mothae deposit, would provide all of the necessary inputs for a thorough economic assessment.
The Toronto- New York- and Gaborone-listed company said it a total of 4 657 ct of diamonds were sold for gross proceeds of $1.51-million, yielding an average price of $324/ct.
The diamond sale consisted of 32 sales parcels of which 26 were sold on a sealed tender. The highest value stone sold was a 9.74 ct Type IIA diamond, one of the finest, which achieved a price of $272 720 or $28 000/ct.
The Mothae processing facility would now, with the consent of the Lesotho government, be placed on care-and-maintenance while the company worked towards completing a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) of the project.
Lucara said the PEA was well advanced and it, together with a National Instrument 43-101-compliant independent technical report, was expected to be complete in the first quarter of 2013.
Lucara subsidiary Mothae Diamonds is jointly held by Lucara (75%) and the Lesotho government (25%).
The company’s Toronto-traded stock closed at 75 Canadian cents a share on Monday.