Placing to Raise £3 million to Expand and Accelerate Exploration at the Company’s Pitfield Project, Commencement of Drilling & Investor Presentation
Empire Metals Limited is pleased to announce that it has raised £3 million before expenses by way of a significantly oversubscribed placing of 75,000,000 new ordinary shares of no par value in the capital of the Company (the ‘Placing Shares’), with new and existing shareholders in the Company, at a price of 4 pence per Placing Share (the ‘Placing’).
The net proceeds of the Placing will be primarily used to allow the Company to expand the planned Phase 1 Reverse Circulation (‘RC’) drill programme, currently scheduled for later this year, following on from the 1,500 metre Diamond Core programme which commenced on 21 September. As announced 13 September 2023, this Phase 1 RC programme will involve a significant drilling campaign, which will be carried out along the length of the high-density gravity core and, in particular, focusing on the very dense zones that have now been identified within the magnetics anomaly. The objective of this drill programme is to not only confirm the scale of this giant, titanium-enriched mineral system but to also understand the distribution of key factors better, such as grade, mineralogy, thickness and extent of mineralised beds and controls on high-grade TiO2 mineralisation. Following this successful Placing, a second phase of RC drilling will now be planned to commence in early 2024, expanding on the targets already included in Phase 1. These additional funds will also allow the Company to commence mineralogical and metallurgical studies which will provide further information on the most economic route to processing.
Shaun Bunn, Managing Director, said: “We have received exceptional results from our exploration efforts at Pitfield to date, and today’s fundraising will ensure that we can continue to push ahead, unimpeded, to a point where we can begin to establish the potential value of this giant, titanium-enriched mineral system. We have received significant support from existing and new investors in this oversubscribed Placing, a sign, I believe, that the market is beginning to grasp the potential global significance of our discovery at Pitfield. I would like to thank our shareholders, both new and old, and I look forward to reporting on the drilling now underway at Pitfield over the coming weeks.”
Application for Admission and Total Voting Rights
The Placing Shares will rank pari passu in all respects with the existing ordinary shares of no par value in the capital of the Company. Application has been made to the London Stock Exchange for the Placing Shares to be admitted to trading on AIM (‘Admission’). It is expected that Admission will become effective on or around 28 September 2023. As a result of the issue of the Placing Shares as described above, the issued share capital of the Company now consists of 567,364,368 ordinary shares of no-par value.
Investor Presentation
An updated corporate presentation is available for download from the Company’s website.
Warrants
The Company has agreed to issue warrants over a total of 1,406,875 ordinary shares in the Company exercisable at 6p per share for a period of two years from date of grant to SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP (Nominated Adviser and Joint Broker) and Shard Capital Partners LLP (Joint Broker).
Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) Disclosure
Certain information contained in this announcement would have been deemed inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, as incorporated into UK law by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, until the release of this announcement.
