Navarre Minerals secures $5m investment to fast-track exploration at Mt Carlton

Navarre Minerals (ASX: NML) has secured a $5 million cornerstone investment from New York-based Lind Partners, which will fund accelerated exploration across its Mt Carlton gold project in Queensland.

Under the deal, Lind will pre-pay $5 million to Navarre in return for $5.6 million-worth of shares.

Once the pre-payment has been received, Navarre will issue an initial 65 million shares to Lind. Subject to shareholder approval, Navarre will also issue almost 73.53 million options to Lind. The options will have a 48 month expiry and are exercisable at $0.051 per share.

The agreement allows for Navarre to repay any amount owing to Lind rather than issue the relevant shares.

Navarre managing director Ian Holland said the company was “very pleased” to secure Lind’s investment.

He said the agreement is structured to allow Navarre to pursue its growth strategy at Mt Carlton along with any potential pricing upside.

Meanwhile, Lind founder Jeff Easton said the company had become a key stakeholder of Navarre during an “exciting time” of its journey.

“We have watched with interest since Navarre’s acquisition of the Mt Carlton operation and see great potential for the company to increase production levels with new sources coming on-line and extend mine life through the company’s well-conceived exploration programs,” he added.

Advancing Mt Carlton

Navarre acquired the Mt Carlton mine, ground and associated infrastructure in late 2021.

During the December quarter, the operation produced 2,873 ounces of gold, 170,092oz silver and 272 tonnes of copper.

This was largely due to predominantly processing stage six ore from the V2 open pit.

Last month, Navarre revealed it had identified multiple new drill targets at Mt Carlton that are close to existing mine infrastructure.

The targets were generated from reprocessing legacy geophysical data and priority ones will be tested as part of Navarre’s 10,000m large orebody discovery exploration (LODE) drilling program which is beginning this month.

“Our immediate interest is the Southeast IP anomaly, which is a large and intense coincident chargeability and resistivity anomaly located 1.4km from the mill,” Mr Holland noted.

“It has a footprint larger in scale than the V2 mine and appears to be linked to V2 by a previously unrecognised northwest trending fault.”