Vast Concessions Beckon SP Mining to Glittering African Mineral Wealth

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--A company to watch in the new scramble for African resources is SP Mining (Singapore/Madrid), which is currently looking to extend its presence to the Middle East and North Africa by establishing a regional office and forming a strategic joint venture in the region, which it considers to be under-explored.

Recently, the company has been awarded a landmark concession to explore for minerals across 130,000 square kilometers in Chad. It has also been contracted to conduct a survey of the rest of the richly resourced country, which will cover an area of 1.2 million square kilometers. The company will have the right to award itself a 70,000-square-kilometer concession from this territory, according to a company statement.

SP Mining president Farshad Zandi said, "The new concessions in Chad, combined with our existing concessions in North Sudan and Guinea-Bissau, make SP Mining one of the largest mining exploration and exploitation companies in the world."

Zandi continued: "These concessions hold immense mineral wealth, including gold, zinc, copper and diamonds, which have been extracted in significant quantities by artisanal miners on a small scale for a long time. In just one of our concessions in the region of Gadareef in North Sudan we have recently discovered one of the largest reserves of gold in Africa. Protracted conflicts in both Chad and North Sudan have prevented scientific exploration until recently."

Under the terms of the agreement with the Chad government, SP Mining is granted the right to create consortiums with third parties to facilitate exploration and extraction.

SP Mining is also negotiating for concessions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Equatorial and Sierra Leone as it continues to expand in Africa.

SP mining uses advanced technologies developed by leading geologists at Graz University in Austria who will analyze data collected from the geological surveys.

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