Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Mawson Gold (TSX: MAW)(OTC: MWSNF) CEO Ivan Fairhall on Exploring 30 New Gold Targets Over 4 km by 4 km Area at 100% Owned Rompas-Rajapalot Gold-Cobalt Project

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Mawson Gold, Mr. Ivan Fairhall. Ivan, how are you today?

Ivan Fairhall: I'm really well, Gerardo. Really well. Great to be back on.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, we have a dollar index flirting with the 110 level, and despite that, gold is rallying above the $1,700 level, which is very, very encouraging. Mawson has been very busy, both in the field and on the corporate side behind the scenes, strengthening its understanding of the geologic potential on the ground and of course bringing in, we just had news this morning, a gentleman with significant capital markets experience that I think bodes well for Mawson and the direction that I think shares are headed, and so why don't we start there with the appointment of a new director to the board of directors?

Ivan Fairhall: Sure, yeah. John Jentz joining the board of Mawson today. Very pleased to have him on board. John's a really accomplished guy. He's worked across investment banking and also in corporate roles in the mining industry, and he's been there when the big deals happen, and most recently two transactions worth over a billion each in the last three years.

He was the Head of Corporate Development for Semafo, was also the Director of North American Palladium. Across his career he's developed a really powerful skill set, not just on the investor facing side but also corporate strategy and how to build value for shareholders.

Mawson's got a lot on its plate. We got a PEA due out likely in October. We've got more to find in Finland, definitely more to find in Finland, and a new property which we're going to talk about today, and a new property in Sweden, and this big chunky block of ASX listed stock in Southern Cross, which is worth nearly the entire value of Mawson, so there's a lot for us to do and we're really excited to have John come and help guide Mawson through the next phases to extract the most value that we can out of this collection of assets we've got.

Gerardo Del Real: Well listen, when you talk about someone that's been in the room when billion-dollar deals are consummated, and not just once but multiple times, and then I look at Mawson's market cap with $44 million, I look at the asset base, I look at the exploration upside, and then I look at the latest release before this morning's release about the 30 gold targets that the new mag survey showed, there's a lot of runway between $44 million Canadian and a billion dollars.

I want to talk about the release that you had a few days ago. It was technical in nature, but even a simple guy like me looks at it and goes, "Okay, 30 gold targets over a four by four kilometer area," and then I read further down and I see that the structures are dated the same age as the property-wide mineralizing event, and so when I continue to read on down, this release screams, even again to a simple person like me, "Go explore the heck out of this thing and go unlock some more value," right, am I reading that wrong?

Ivan Fairhall: You absolutely are. Look, we've got a big property up there in Finland and this new magnetic survey's really opened things up. Just to try to explain it a little bit in simple terms for people, because it is a complicated release that the geologists have really put a lot of thought into what we're doing, but just to try to explain it, Finland's covered in a thin layer of glacial till. It's only a few meters deep, but it makes mapping the surface of the earth a little bit difficult because you can't see what's going on. It's only a few meters, so geophysical surveys are one way that we can look underneath that till and find out what's going on. But what are we looking for?

There's two factors here that we cover in this news release that are really important in finding big deposits, and things that we think that we've identified on our property, and the first of that's gold fluids. We know that we have intense gold-cobalt fluids moving across our property. We have Rajapalot, over a million ounces. It's open down dip, 30 meters of five grams a tonne's the deepest hole into the property. We don't know how far it goes, but we know it'll get bigger and we know there was serious gold deposited over there.

All the way on the other side of our property, eight kilometers away, we had at our Rompas discovery where we're six meters at 617 grams a tonne gold. I think it's the best hole ever drilled in Finland. It's nuggety, so not something that we pulled into a resource, but if you want to understand how much gold is moving around in the system, then that's probably the best thing that you can hope to see, and so there's two things eight kilometers away, but they're the same gold event and they happen to also be the same gold event that 1.8-billion-year fluid event which formed Agnico's 10-million-ounce Kittilä project and also Rupert's 4-million-ounce Ikkari deposit.

So we know there was gold, but then well, how do we find out where it accumulated as it was moving around, and that's where this magnetic survey and this structure comes into place. The structures are formed when the rocks are moving around and they create little spaces that can get filled by fluids. This survey's allowed us to identify and date the structures, and what we're looking for and what we've found is where you have the structures moving around, creating those spaces, at the same time as the gold fluids are moving around and filling those spaces, and that's what we are looking for and that's what we think we've found.

That's where the biggest deposits in Finland have formed, and even globally really around that 1.8-billion-year event was a really important time, and so yeah, we found about 30 places on the property in that center part of the property, a place we've never explored before, where we believe those conditions have occurred.

Gerardo Del Real: There's a lot of support for this project, not just because of the gold that's there, but obviously because of the cobalt that's also there, a critical mineral that on a global scale we're looking to source more of from responsible partners and stakeholders, and so if that's all there was, was the gold and the cobalt resource, you could easily justify the $44 million market cap. We talked about the Southern Cross holding which again, would you like to remind everybody what that's worth?

Ivan Fairhall: Oh, it is worth over $30 million today.

Gerardo Del Real: So nearly the entire market cap minus cash of Mawson Gold, you get the million ounces of gold and the by-product cobalt, which is strategically important. But this release here, the release with the exploration upside, I think really underscores the potential for this to become a takeout target in the not-too-distant future, because I think anybody that's looked at this project pretty much has told me, people that I know, people that I trust, have told me, "This is going to be a mine. The only question is will it be a two million gold ounce mine, a three million gold ounce mine, a four million gold ounce mine?" Look, I'm excited for the exploration upside. How are you looking to unlock that, Ivan?

Ivan Fairhall: This part of the property... there's multiple places that we still can explore and will explore on the property, but the areas that we talked about in this news release here, there's some simple work that we can do. It's something that's widely done in Finland and actually has created some of the critical breakthroughs in those other discoveries that I mentioned, is a combination of what they call partial wedge sampling where you take samples of the till and you assay it in a certain way to identify where you think the gold is, and also base-of-till drilling where you drill through this till and you take a sample from just the top of that bedrock.

As I say, they're very widely used techniques. We can cover a lot of area, so we can get through these 30 targets fairly quickly for relatively low cost, and so that's how we target, that's how we're going to explore this part of the property, and obviously we've talked earlier, there's a lot of other gold in and around our existing deposit, down dip in particular. There's more to find there which will require more drilling, and other targets on the property, which we'll continue to work through when we get a moment.

Gerardo Del Real: And we didn't even touch on the recent discovery in Sweden, so a lot to like. Ivan, anything to add to that?

Ivan Fairhall: No, I think it's as you've mentioned, there's a lot going on in Mawson, a lot for us to do, but plenty of opportunity to create value for shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm looking forward to catching up with you in person at Beaver Creek next week. I encourage anyone that's out there that's curious about Mawson or just wants to come say hello, to come and do so. Come say hi, we'd love to shake everyone's hand and it'll be good to get back out there in person. Ivan, thank you so much for your time.

Ivan Fairhall: Thanks a lot Gerardo, great to be on.

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