People: Chasing a richer seam

One former broker pleased to have switched into mining is Richard Chase, former managing director of Ambrian Partners, who has been running Ethiopian gold hopeful Nyota Minerals since April and recently cheered followers with a new formal resource estimate of 1.5 million oz of gold at the company’s Tulu Kapi gold project in Ethiopia.

Ambrian has recently been contending with bids for control, activist investors and personality clashes and has been a scene of ‘stress and strife’, says Chase, who clearly finds his new role more congenial.

AIM-quoted Nyota, an Australian-based AIM counter which began its quoted life as gem flop Dwyka Diamonds, has had its own upheavals, though these have had a positive outcome, insists Chase. With former chief executive Melissa Sturgess still in the chairman’s role, Chase adopted a new approach to developing the Tulu Kapi resource and grades, which have been improved to a (still modest) 2.84 grammes a tonne, and hopes to have a bankable feasibility study ready within 12 months.

Nyota is looking at 20 other targets in a 20 km radius of Tulu Kapi and Chase has talked to ‘14 investment institutions in a week’. Having spent 11 years at Ambrian, ‘I know most of the players in the City’, he reflects, and, having previously been a mining geologist at African gold group SAMAX when it was taken over by Ashanti Goldfields, he understands African mining, too.

Now ‘back where I came from’ and ‘enjoying putting my geology back to work’, Chase says recent events at Ambrian – whose boss Tom Gaffney left earlier this year – show that ‘activist shareholders’, such as non-executive director Julian McIntyre, can be (unintentionally) ‘detrimental’.

He recalls it was clear that certain key players were not going to work well together, stressing ‘some forget that broking is all about people’.