Lahontan Gold Corp. (TSXV:LG), is a Canada-based mineral exploration company. The Company is engaged in the identification, acquisition, evaluation and exploration of mineral properties in Nevada. It has been a patient and persistent journey for Lahontan Gold and exciting news has recently been released about the company’s closure of private placement of sale of common shares by Victoria Gold.
Lyndsay Malchuk from Stockhouse Publishing sat down with Chair, CEO, and President Kimberly Ann to converse about this topic and more.
The following is a transcription of the above video, and The Market Online has edited it for clarity.
Lyndsay: First off, bring us up to speed here. What is the latest with Lahontan’s activities?
Kimberly: Such a great question. We’ve been working really hard behind the scenes with our permitting with our Santa Fe project, but also as everybody knows, Victoria Gold had a large chunk of our company. Over 50 million shares, 25% of our company.
With that difficult situation, we’ve been working really hard with the receivership PWC to move that block into friendly hands.
Our shareholders that have been very loyal to us from the beginning of the company and we’ve managed to accomplish that. So, big deep breath there.
When people say what’s wrong with the company, they look at our stock price. Well, there’s nothing wrong with the company. This overhang of this uncertainty played into all of that.
Having that moved is very fortunate for us and in good hands. But more importantly now I can come out and talk to you, Lyndsay, and others, and talk about what we’re actually doing on the ground, how we’re going to move this company to the next level.
Lyndsay: Lahontan has filed his PEA, what key milestones are you targeting to advance the project?
Kimberly: When we put out our PEA, I mean, RPA was very heavy, detailed on the engineering side because we’re deep in the weeds of the permitting process.
We cared more about all of that information being so detailed because without that we couldn’t get the permits filed for moving dirt and how much electricity and things like that you would actually put in the PFS level. So that was fantastic.
The numbers look good. The CapEx was only 135 million with a 20% contingency. The IR’s 41% you know, project life of mine is nine years. It’s just the starting point for the company.
That we like to see, certainly I always want it to be more than it is, but at the end of the day, getting that out to the public and allowing them to see it grow through the next six to nine months is important to us.
We know from this document what the next steps are to make things better, to have, you know, the mine life longer, to have the recoveries maybe 10% better than they are now because we have that information and now we know where to go. So very critical for the company and for the public to see here’s our baseline and we’re going to continue to move it forward.
Lyndsay: What are the key objectives that you are focused on achieving in the coming months?
Kimberly: We’re very focused on the permitting. But that’s kind of quiet and behind the scenes. So it’s not really sexy stuff that people get to hear about so much because it’s just dealing with the government and going through these steps. It’s very methodical. So we are doing all of that. And you know, look, we have a new administration and they are making some changes to streamline the process.
It’s going to be fantastic for the future of mining. That being said, we’re so deep into the process. The concerns we always have is time. Time is never on your side. And so with these changes, we are staying on top of how does this affect our company? Does it affect it? So we’re, we’re being very cautious of that. That being said, we have a fantastic West Santa Fe asset that we purchased for very low cost that is 15 kilometers away from Santa Fe proper.
People are going to start to hear news about this. It’s a great asset with size ability that we look as a satellite operation.
We’re going to get back to the drill rig and play over there. And then a sidecar of all that is we’re working very closely with Kappes Cassiday to improve our metallurgical knowledge base so that we can start getting better recoveries.
The recoveries are good now for the mine, but they can always be better. And we want this project to be as perfect as possible.
So again, we’re just doing all the work on the ground and I’m coupling it with a really hard push to get out there and meet with as many retail shareholders as we can because our float is pretty small. It’s only about 38% now that we’ve moved this block and it’s in great he hands with these long-term investors.
But that certainly doesn’t move the needle of our stock. So the stock is very inexpensive right now. It’s a great buy.
We have a lot of good newsletter writers following us. Jay Taylor just put out a great report recently, the day after we traded 7 million shares or close to it. So people are listening and that’s the voices I want to be speaking to.
They understand we have a great asset in the Walker Lane with infrastructure, a past producer, and we’re going for it.
We’re going to be moving this project forward and people are going to see major milestones that we’re going to be hitting and whether we’re hitting a milestone one way or the other, I’m still going to be doing videos to get it out there so people know here we are and here’s our process. It may not be a formal press release, but I’m still going to be giving the information all the times.
If people can know what’s going on all the time then they feel comfortable with what we’re doing on the ground.
Lyndsay: Just one more question for you. Given the uncertainty with the geopolitics and with the threat of tariffs coming in across the board, how is Lahontan navigating through all of that?
Kimberly: We’re doing okay right now, because it’s all just starting. We work in Nevada in the US and when I raise funds, it’s in US dollars.
We already have a massive hurdle of discounting just from the dollar 25% of everything we raise. So right now we have a really lean and mean team.
I know a lot of investors want to see a beefed up team, an engineer, and a COO and all this. And I frankly, just at this point with our company, I don’t believe in that. I believe in having fantastic consultants so that I can control the dollars spent in that direction so that we get that knowledge.
We don’t need to have multiple $300,000 salaries going around with this situation. With the environment we’re living in right now, so much is unknown and I do think the Trump administration is going to be extremely aggressive for the next four years because he has nothing to lose.
It’s going to be good for all of this, but gold is soaring as we know. It’s hitting the majors. They’re having a great time with this price.
It’s starting to hit the development stories, the known development stories, but the junior space is not there yet.
And the junior space, once it hits, it’s going to go crazy like we’ve seen it do in the past. Advice to so many shareholders is buy every cheap stock in your portfolio that you believe in because it, you can easily get a 10x, 15x, 20x on these once it starts soaring.
Who knows what the limit’s going to be.
The race is the next four years. This is what we know. We know we have Trump in power and that he is going to be aggressive. We know gold is backing everything right now, it frankly has for so long. So, we’re excited to see when it hits the junior level because I think we’ll all be smiling a lot more when we see that happen.
For us on the ground, we’re just going to continue to be methodical and get our things done.
One thing we are going to be focused on beefing up is our board.
As you know, we lost John McConnell off our board with the whole Victoria fiasco.
We’re now looking at critical board members that we could bring in that can help. I’ve been a part of building three mines. It’s not like I can’t do it or my team can’t do it, but having more experts to bounce ideas off is always a great thing.
We’re going to look at having some key people on our board that can give us that technical background. You know, capital markets background. I have an extensive amount of that. So we’re going to be focused on that as a company.
Lyndsay: You can find Lahontan Gold Corp. on the venture under the ticker symbol LG. And for more information on them, their website is lahontangoldcorp.com.
Company shares last traded at $0.040.
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