Oriole Resources (LSE:ORR) — Corporate Update

0:01 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the ORIOLE RESOURCES PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the q and a tab that's situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the investor meet company platform. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Tim Livesey. Tim, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. Thank you very much, And good afternoon to everybody who's who's dialed in.

0:47 I'm going to give you a run through a bit of an update on where we are at ORIOLE. We've had a little bit of news out in in the last couple of weeks, as you're probably aware. And then we'll open up to a couple of couple of questions after that. So please do jump on to the to the q and a and put your questions up in front of myself and the team, and we will answer them. Or I will answer them on behalf of the team as well as I can. So let's kick off. We all know, or we should know where we are operating. We are primarily in Cameroon. We do have an asset still in Senegal, which is under joint venture still with Manijem.

1:33 And we also have some investment properties and royalties in Turkey and Djibouti. But Cameroon is very much our primary focus. And we are gold explorers, but we also have a lot of competence for base metals within the team. So we keep our options open for opportunities as they come across as we continue our exploration. We are looking to unlock shareholder value and as early stage explorers we have a great team to do that. We are very technically focused between myself, Claire Bay, our Executive Director Exploration and BD, and Dave Pelham, one of our non execs, we have over eighty years of cumulative exploration experience in gold and base metals, a lot of it focused in Africa and West Africa specifically.

2:31 To complement that, we have fantastic accounting and financial support from both our CFO, Bob Smeaton, and also our Chair, our Independent Non Exec Chair, Eileen Carr. Both Bob and Eileen are certified accountants. And Eileen has spent significant part of her career working in the mineral resources sector in Africa and elsewhere. And Bob has significant experience in the AIM markets. So collectively, we have a very strong team to support our geologists and field crews. We are explorationists, and we typically do a lot of the things which are outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, just as a matter of course.

3:20 It's very natural for us to operate in these environments, and it's natural for us to build and support our links with local communities. So whilst we monitor the entire suite of UN goals, we especially focus on just a handful, which are relevant to our projects at the stage we are at today. And obviously, we review this as a board and a management team as the projects advance. But we're very pleased to see that we are really leading the way in Cameroon, in the mining sector in Cameroon, with our engagement with local communities, local universities and academic institutions. And to that extent, supporting through direct employment and also through providing opportunities for undergraduates, local geologists and technicians across the diverse range that we have within the Cameroon population.

4:19 At Cameroon, why do we think it's interesting? Why have we been here for the last six years? Well, it's been massively under explored. We looked at Cameroon in quite detail back in 2018, when we first looked at coming into Bibami and Wapuzi through an earn in joint venture. And we identified that there were massive tracts of land in Cameroon totally open at that stage to exploration. It sits between the Congo Kraton and the West African Kraton. It's a highly prospective sort of mobile belt setting. And it carries all of the signatures that we feel are important for orogenic gold systems to be developed.

5:05 It's got the right post rocks, the right alteration, grade and style. It also has significant deep crustal structures that actually run all the way through Cameroon. It's known as the Central Cameroon Shear Zone. And this belt cuts across back into South America and Brazil, if you were to relocate the continents. And it really has all of the outstanding features that we thought were important for developing neurogenic gold targets. Combined with that, it has a new mining code. Cameroon identified within the ministry and the government in Cameroon, they identified that they were falling behind perhaps the amount of exploration in the mining sector that was going into the countries around them.

5:51 And they engaged with the World Bank, they brought in, developed a new mining code with the support of the Finnish geological survey. And they brought in a countrywide assessment of prospectivity funded by the World Bank, but supported by BRGM, the French Geological Survey, which has decades of experience in West Africa and has been the source of many of the of our neighboring countries success in the mining sector over the last fifty or sixty years. So a great jurisdiction geologically, great jurisdiction for mineral potential, underexplored for various reasons, but we believe those reasons were changing with this real focus by the local Cameroonian government and the ministry on bringing in investment by upgrading the mining code, new licensing systems, and a countrywide prospectivity analysis.

6:47 Sorry, I'll just I'll just pop back to that slide. The other thing that's really interesting in Cameron is the infrastructure. I'm going to attempt very badly, probably just to to circle our main license areas. That's what we call the CLP, central license package. And then up here, we have Wapusi and Bibomie, which are our more advanced main resource of Bibomie, and a limestone target up at Wapusi. Now those two areas sit within very close proximity to domestic airports. In the North, we have the airport at Garawa. Just south of our central license package, we have Ngoanderi Airport.

7:35 And of course, down at Yowndi, the capital where our admin base is, is the international airport. So we have good infrastructure in internal flights to be able to get to site very quickly. We also have a very good road network, which is marked on this in red. We have a good power network, which is marked on here in green. And you can see straight away that our key licenses are actually supported by both road and power. Very important. This is this is not exploration in a in an area which is extremely difficult to get to. It's not at 5,000 meters in the Andes. It's not up a remote track somewhere. This is stuff that we can fly to within an hour from the main capital city and drive and be on-site. In the case of the Eastern And Western CLP, we can be on-site within about half an hour. So significantly useful from an exploration point of view. And that of course means exploration is simple, it's cheap, it's quick.

8:42 Now you may have seen obviously the announcement we made on the deal, the heads of terms with BCM on two deals in Cameroon. BCM is a services, mining services and civil services provider. They're a large privately run company. They've been established in Africa since 1990. They actually started off before that in Australia. And they have provided mining support and mining construction support to various large companies, the likes of AngloGold Ashanti, Newmont, etcetera, over the last few decades in these parts of West Africa. BCM, were talking to for quite a while on our Bibami project initially, and they were quite interested on the fact that we've been able to develop a resource here, and they wanted to see if they could come in and do something with that resource.

9:43 And more recently, we talked to them also about our central license package, and specifically, they put a focus on Ambe, which is our more advanced of the targets there. So the deals are very similar structure. Two parallel deals. Both of them have a signature bonus at heads of terms sorry, at earning level, which is expected to be before the end of the year. And then after that cash payment to ORIOLE RESOURCES, the main commitment is $4,000,000 in each of Bibami and MbAY, so 8,000,000 in total to go directly into the ground in exploration on those two projects. Both projects also carry success based payments should we announce JOR compliant resources of a million ounces or more.

10:37 And we have a very simple structure of 1,000,000, 2,000,000, 3,000,000 ounce targets with associated cash payments. So these are significant investments from BCM. Obviously, heads of terms signed subject to some due diligence work, is ongoing right now. We have teams out in Cameroon from BCM being hosted by our West African manager and our local teams. But we're looking to complete these by the end of this year and move into activities on both licenses as we get into 2024. Now I'll just start with the Bibami project and give you a background as to why we think BCM was interested and what we think the potential is here.

11:25 Bibami was one of our earlier projects, we came on an earning agreement with this back in 2018. And we identified quite a long structure at Bibami, which was carrying significant gold mineralization at surface. And initially we were focused on this sort of structure coming through here. And then subsequently we identified parallel structure off to the east in this more mafic units. And we have four areas identified here. We have the Bokassi Zone 1, which is the area where we've done most of our drilling. And then we have Bokassi Zone 2, just to the east of it, Lower East and Lower West. Now these four areas all show gold on surface associated with orogenic sheeted vein systems, but Bokassi Zone 1 was the largest of these, so that took priority from our drilling programs.

12:28 We carried out four phases of drilling over the space of nineteen months. We went from mobilization of a drill rig in 2021, through to the development and delivery of a resource, a maiden resource, in December 2022. We intersected significant mineralization here. We have the widest intercept from the more recent drilling 14.8 meters grading 4.27 grams a tonne. And this allowed us the confidence on the on the back of 6,005 meters of drilling to take our results to a group called FORGE, who are independent mineral resource calculation was completed by, and they came up with based on an 1,800 pit shell, they came up with a resource of 305,000 ounces at 2.19 grams.

13:35 Now, in addition to that, they identified what's called a residual exploration target in JORC terminology of up to 148,000 ounces. Now, what does this mean? Essentially, these are two pits. If you look on the oblique view, the the blue blue background screen, you can see one larger pit to the south and a smaller pit to the north. And then if you look on the image on the right, you'll see again the outlines of these pits with a gap in between them. There's the southern pit and there's the northern pit. Now, the reality is that we have done a limited amount of drilling here. We haven't done a resource drill out program. We did this calculation based on what was effectively prospect level drilling, and we just simply don't have data between these pits.

14:31 So in this area in between the two ore bodies, the reason there's a gap there is simply we haven't drilled it yet. And you'll note from this image that the ore bodies are both open at depth and open along strike to the Northeast, which is which is to the top right in this image on the right hand side. So 300,000 ounces plus potentially about another 150 in chalk exploration target. So we're looking at close to half a million ounces here already subject to a little bit more confirmatory drilling. But remember that this is open at depth and open along strike to the Northeast, so that 400 to 500,000 ounces could easily translate to something significantly larger. And in addition to that, we had to put quite an aggressive top cut in this.

15:21 This is quite nuggetty gold. We get some spectacularly high grades, sort of two to three ounce material, you know, up to 130 grams a tonne in hand specimens. And we we cannot include that in the resource model because it's an outlier. So we apply what they call a top cut, and we we disregard any super high grades in this calculation. Now, obviously, the more drilling we do, the more confidence we get, we can increase that top cut, which again could bring in resources. But we're looking here at 2.2 grams a tonne is approximately double, what a lot of West African, gold mines, open pit gold mines are running on right now. So a very significant resource potentially. And that's just a Bokassi Zone One. We also, in addition to Bokassi Zone 1, we have Bokassi Zone 2 shown here on the geophysics map, Lower East and Lower West.

16:16 And these bodies are we do have a limited amount of drilling on those. The best result we had at Bokassi sorry, at Lower East, for example, three meters grading 12.3 grams. So we know that there's mineralization in these other systems. We see it on surface. We see it outcropping on surface. We see it in some artisanal diggings on surface, and we also see it from some of our prospect level drilling. So the potential here, in addition to developing the existing resource of PLC Zone one, potential here is to add ounces in these are the four areas, these are the three areas giving up to four target areas in total. Now, throughout this presentation, I would encourage you to please pay close attention to the scale bars on these images.

17:03 It's very easy to misrepresent and misunderstand exactly the potential we're looking at here. In this map, we see a scale bar down in the bottom of the image here. This is two kilometers from side to side. So we're looking at four potential targets here, Bokassi Zone 1, Bokassi Zone 2, Lower East, Lower West, that are all within a couple of kilometers of each other. So potentially, what we're looking at here, should these other targets give give us resources, we're looking at a small tight multi pit mine development project with the centralized processing plant, which ultimately would mean short haul distances, you know, one to two kilometers max, and make the efficiencies of that mine plant much, much better.

17:57 We know it's high grade, 2.2 in the resource to date, perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 ounce potential at the Cassy Zone one. It doesn't take much from the Cassy Zone 2, Lower East or Lower West, one, two, or all three of those targets. Some complementary ounces from those, remembering these are all mineralized from surface, and pretty soon you're breaking a million ounces in this area. So you can see why we find this area very interesting and why we've put a lot of our work into it. But you can also see why it might be interesting to BCM who are established now in Cameroon. They've set up a company in Cameroon. They're mobilizing equipment into Cameroon, and they're looking to lead the way in in doing mine development in Cameroon. This offers the potential to be a very easy project to get started on, and we're very enthusiastic to be partners with them. It's also important to note that in both of our deals here, we are looking at them gaining BCM gaining a 50% position, not a 51.

19:02 We have the option at completion of that earn in to contribute and maintain our 50%, maintain our control of the work. And all of the work being done here, we are the geologists, BCM are the are the civils and and mining contractors. We provide all the geological and logistics support in country. So a great deal for us, great deal for Bibami, and we can exactly see why BCM is interested in this particular license. Now if we go on to the Mbei license, it's part of our package in the center of the country, which we call the CLP for short, the central license package. And bay license that they're signed up on is actually this license here in the right hand towards the right hand side.

19:52 You can see that we have a number of licenses here over 4,000 square kilometers. So essentially the area of Greater London under licensing here, we have a package which we call the Western CLP, which is these three licenses on the left. We have the, Eastern CLP, which are these five licenses here. Excuse my rather scrabbly, drawing here. That's the Eastern CLP. And then we have a couple of additional licenses down in the South at Gambuku and Maboom, which is a license under application at the moment. Now why did we pick the center of the country? We did a countrywide analysis of our own back in 2018 and 2019.

20:44 And we identified that there was a huge potential for gold, origin gold in this central area of Cameroon. We actually identified seven areas across Cameroon. We ranked them and we went to the mining cadastre system, which is a publicly available online website. And when we first went in in 2019, before we submitted our applications, we were assuming that the best areas, the highest ranked areas that we'd identified would already be taken. That wasn't the case. This entire land package was open ground when we applied for it back in 2019. And when the licenses were then granted in early twenty twenty, we were sorry, early twenty twenty one, we were then very surprised to see that this pre Kasim map, this World Bank funded map, which is this, this large map in the center of the country here. The pre Kasim map had identified after we'd put our application in, they'd identified an area of Central Cameroon, which they thought was the most prospective for organic gold. You'll see a yellow line on this map, which I'm just emphasizing with my pink cursor at the moment. That is what BRGM considers to be the most prospective area for gold exploration in Cameroon.

22:07 And you'll see that our license package lies entirely within that area. So we were obviously very pleased that our application had been supported by this later, ten months later publication by the World Bank. We weren't particularly surprised they found it interesting because obviously their criteria for gold exploration are the same as ours. But we're very pleased to get that confirmation that our license package was a great place to be. And I mentioned earlier this concept of scale, And I just draw your attention here to two things. First of all, is this scale bar in on the Precasta map, 50 kilometer scale bar up here at the top.

22:53 And secondly, to the image on the right hand side, where this is to this was actually put together for our internal use within our exploration team. The concept we have here is to try to explain to our exploration geologists that scale matters. And we are we are looking for projects at a district level here. We are not looking for, necessarily individual, small scale targets. We're looking for district level, licenses. Now what we do to to try and highlight that is we do a comparison of our license holding against an existing known well endowed area. And in this case, what we're looking at here is a cutout of what we call the Kniebe Inlier in Eastern Senegal, on the Senegal Mali shear zone.

23:51 And this is an area which is endowed over 50,000,000 ounces, multiple mines, multiple development projects. You can see the the key structures in this case going North South, the Senegal Mali shear zone, where this mineralization is associated with these and with displays off that shear zone. And you can see if you if you look at our license package footprint, which we've dropped onto this, you'll see that in this footprint, we have the potential to capture. If we had this whole area in Senegal, we'd have the potential to capture over 50,000,000 ounces. Now if you transfer that back into Cameroon, on the using the pre Kasim map, you can see straight away that we have a similar potential within Cameroon.

24:37 And we believe this is a mining district rather than a new mining district rather than just an individual little target. Now, if we zoom in on our central license package, here we've shaded the license boundaries differently to reflect the Western, the Eastern CLP and a couple of new applications on the right hand side there. But the critical thing to note here is what we believe is the boundaries of a gold corridor. You'll see a dotted line on the southern edge, which I'm highlighting now, and you'll see a dotted line on the northern edge, and you'll see a number of outlines. Some of them just outlines in yellow like this one I'm showing you now, and some of them yellow that's been filled in.

25:28 So the difference is these two major trends are shear zones. This is the Chile Ribano shear zone. This is the Benue shear zone, or not the direct shear, these are the rough trace of the shear zones. And what we're looking at here is a corridor of mineralization. Again, at the scale bar, 20 kilometers here. So if we look at this area, we're looking at 75 kilometers long, 15 kilometers wide. We're looking at golden soil anomalies in these solid shapes, golden stream anomalies in these empty shapes. And you can see significant evidence of gold anomalism throughout this corridor.

26:16 And that's why we talk about this bigger district scale opportunity. You know, we we really feel that we have the potential here for multiple development targets rather than just a single license with a single project on it. Now the deal we've just signed with BCM is focused on one of these licenses only. That's the Inbay license. That's this one up here in the Northeast. The rest of the licenses are all completely under our control. The two license, two Eastern Malts licenses, this one and this one, the Gambuku license and the Maboom license. Gambuku was granted based on some lithium anomalous and we'd identified in our multi element analysis.

27:02 And MABOOM is simply an extension to the application to extend this trend through into the neighboring ground. So we have significant opportunity here in the central licenses, and only one of those licenses seeing a $4,000,000 in the ground exploration earn in for 50%. The rest of them still completely under our control. We have seen, this is a bit of a zoom in on them, Bay. And this shows you really why the BCM team have found it quite exciting. Based on some early work we've done in this area, we can see immediately, again, very high grades, 134 grams a tonne here, 131 grams a tonne here, 19 grams a ton up here, 64 grams a ton up here. We see significant mineralization in this north, just off north south trending, semi perpendicular to the main east west trend.

28:13 So what we see here is this is a zoom in, this a three kilometer trend, a couple of 100 meters wide. This is the most advanced exploration work we've done to date. We announced this area as we are obliged to in the middle of the year, and we did have a little bit of activity from some artisanal miners on that. The image on the left shows a a large vein structure running through the middle here, approximately two meters wide. The image on the right shows two coalescing vein structures joining in here, and you can see mineralization in the veins, but most importantly, the mineralization also open to the host rock on either side. Now this is significant because mineralization bleeding out into the host rock gives you the opportunity for a very quick volume build, if you are if you're looking to do open pit mining.

29:15 And this is, again, a great example of the mineralization literally poking out of the ground. You know, this is the ground surface. The mineralization here at Mbe literally daylights as it does at Bibami. So the Mbe target, obviously, can understand why BCM want to come in on this. It's the most advanced of the five Eastern licenses that we've worked on to date, and it shows us straight away, that there is potential mineralization here that can be chased and upgraded very quickly with the use of the wonderful truth machine at a drill rig. Now the Eastern CLP, we've carried out some ground based geophysics at Utn Bay, and we're doing, we're currently doing some interpretation on that work. BCM, as I mentioned, are have a due diligence period on Mbei, they're actually out in the field as we speak.

30:08 And once that's completed, we'll get hopefully the confirmation of of the finalization of the earning agreements, and they'll be off to the races, and our team will be expanding the exploration on this easternmost license within our Eastern CLP package. Now that's Cameroon, and that's very exciting, you know, dollars 8,000,000 potentially between the two deals coming into the ground, still leaving us with a large number of licenses of our own, which we can put our own money into, or potentially open up to other investors. At a project level, the money coming in from BCM is project level finance. It's non dilutionary to our existing shareholders, but we also have routes to other cash.

30:56 We have the Sonala project in Senegal, and this is a large license four seventy two square kilometers, which was originally subject to an earn in by IAMGOLD to the tune of a maximum of $8,000,000 for a 70 equity stake in this license. Now IAMGOLD sold out their entire package of West African exploration targets and development targets to Managem. Earlier this year, Managem is a Moroccan based mining company. They have a number of substantial mining operations. They are very well connected in West Africa. And they primarily came in and took took that package of licenses off, or bought them rather off IAMGOLD, primarily for the more advanced BOTO project, which is just down here to the Southeast of the Sonarla license.

31:55 Now we have a number of targets on the Sonarla license marked here with the yellow stars, and the most advanced of those is the Far A prospect up in the North. But some of those targets are also quite close to the Bolto mine development project. So Managem came in, they have continued the exploration earning for which IAMGOLD were busy with, and the option period for this the second phase at which they can reach a maximum of 70%, that option period is finalized in February next year. So at that point, if they have spent $8,000,000, they have a 70% position. If they haven't spent the $8,000,000, they have the option to pay us the balance, and reach 70%, or to stay at the whatever percentage they're at. And we we go into a contribute or dilute situation after that. Currently, they're sitting on the current expenditure to date, they're sitting around 60% ownership.

32:56 If they want to push that to 70%, they would be looking to to supply either an additional $2,000,000 of exploration between now and the end of February, or the middle of February rather, or give us that $2,000,000 balance in cash. We we don't believe there's there's enough time for them to spend all of that in exploration in the ground between now and the end of the option period. So we we are in discussions with Managem about how to go forward on this. And, you know, as good partners, we are we are looking at all the options here. Obviously, manage them are still finding their feet in Senegal. They've they've taken on the Bolto development project, which is a significant mine development, and they're moving ahead with it quite aggressively.

33:41 But they they see the value here in Sonala, And it's now really a discussion about how best to create more value. The only resource that's been published on Sonola was actually some that we did on the far end prospect, a couple of years ago, back in 2021. And again, similar to what we have in in Cameroon, we're looking at a multi pit story here. We're looking at approximately six kilometers of trend with three identified mineralized segments within this six kilometer trend. We have far a north, far a south, and then in the bottom left hand corner, far a far south, which was a late discovery. And you can see from this table on the right hand side, the grades in the Witsea are significant.

34:28 This is a very interesting area. It's very close to the Cheshire Resources ground, just sort of 10 or 12 kilometres along to the east. And there are additional targets beyond these in the far right area. We created a very simplistic open pit constrained resource back in 2021, really to try to push iron gold along in their exploration. And at the time we'd identified 155,000 ounces at 1.26 grams based on a 0.3 cut off, Again, 1,800 pit shell like we used in camera, and an additional 190,000 to 280,000 ounces in chalk exploration target.

35:16 So again, close to half a million ounces just in these two small pits in the center of the Far A target area. Significant opportunity still to expand and extend this. This was a maiden resource and can be built on the still open ended along strike and depth and more detailed drilling, more detailed resource drilling could rapidly increase the resource here. So we are, you know, we're, as I say, we're talking to manage them, they're looking at this as well, getting themselves up to speed the exploration that's been done here and deciding how best they want to take it forward. But ultimately, this could be an asset which could provide funds for us to push back into Cameroon or into indeed into other targets elsewhere.

36:09 We have been very unusual in the junior sector in that we started our exploration back in 2018, 2019. We went aggressively into very, very early stage generative exploration, grassroots exploration in a completely underexplored open areas of Cameroon. Now, typically, that takes a little bit longer to get traction. Your early exploration is developing rock chip samples and soil samples, which really don't excite the market very much. And so by necessity, we've had to do a little bit of fundraising in the public equity issues. And we've been criticised for that in the past. Obviously, we would point to the fact we've we've done all this through COVID.

36:58 And we've also done it through the beginning of the Ukraine war, which had a global effect on the economy. But if you fast forward to where we are today, with project level funding coming in at Bibami, project level funding coming in at Mbei, potential project level funding on the rest of our projects in in Cameroon, this is all nondilutionary money coming into the company to advance those early projects that we took the risk on and that you as shareholders backed us to take that risk on. We are now in a position where we have assets to to realize value from such as Sonata, where we could potentially have a sale. We have funding coming in at project level using our teams. So offsetting the cost of our G and A costs by using our teams through that funding in Cameroon, logistics and geological and admin teams, and still leaving us multiple licenses open within Cameroon for additional exploration, which we can then use our own resources on to push forward.

38:02 So we believe it's been a it's been a very tough few years for our teams. It's been a very tough few years for you as investors, but we believe we are at a transformational stage in the company's history. And we hope that you will hang in and benefit from that with us as we push forward with BCM as our fiftyfifty, ultimately fiftyfifty partners in developing some of these great assets and these great new frontier district scale plays in Central Cameroon. Thank you very much.