Aquitaine Metals

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Hey, just when you're ready, OK. Everybody, thanks for coming. I'm Chris Taylor. I'm the CEO of Aquitaine Metals, or En Francais, Aquitaine, so I'll pronounce it correctly. this is a project that I'm very keen on, which is in, the central region of France. It's the western part of the Massif Central. most people know me from my past company, Great Bear, so I'm gonna make a few comparisons to this project and the one that we sold to Kinross a few years ago, for $1.8 billion. in my mind, this project has much bigger potential, than the one that we had, previously sold, and, I, I'll, I'll make some comparison points. I'm gonna make a number of forward-looking statements, so just keep that in mind. Now this project in Aquitaine is located in sort of the central area of France. Bordeaux is a couple hours' drive away. The nearest town is Limoges. It's about a half hour north of where the property is located, and this area is principally a small scale agriculture. Part of the project that we have is owned by Arano, the uranium company, because their predecessor Kajima Mining was the last, the last company to have this project in production. And in fact production shut down in 2002, so this is the most recently operating precious metal mining district in France. So. we've had some really nice early drill results. We have been drilling now for almost a year and a half years. And so those are highlighted numbers like 350 g over 1.5 within, over 1 ounce over 15 m. very nice results so far. But I do want to emphasize that in addition to the gold, the project does host a significant critical metal component as well. And so there's quite a bit of antimony. on the north and south end of our property, and it's an accessory mineral with the gold in many places. Now, historically on this project, there has been a lot of mining, and when we look at the data, the archaeological work and other things, we see that it was probably the area with the most amount of, ancient times mining in France and so on. This project, it's a 330 square kilometer area. We've identified using the government's, LIDAR, geophysical data set, over 900 sites where the Gallic tribes were doing open pit mining in this area. So, this is the most densely mined area over this sort of, you know, size that I've seen in my career. It's amazing to see, that the areas. Effectively pockmarked by all these historic mines. So, pretty amazing. But in the 20th century, there was an additional 20 mines that were put in. And so there was a Canadian explorer called Lindsay Thair that came over in the early 1900s, realized that all these holes in the ground were gold mines, and there was some, a few 100,000 ounces of about 20 g that were developed at that time. And of course Kajima, the French company, came in later on and they were mining afterwards and so. The thing about the size of the project is it's very significant, like 330 square kilometers. When you think about it, it's over 20 kilometers north, south and east-west, and I compare this to my other project, Great Bear, which is the image that you see on the left side of the screen, and that's the Red Lake District in Canada. It's an important comparison to make because I understand that district. Obviously we did a lot of work there. But if you think about what that district would contain on that red polygon, which is the outline of the project in France, if you superimpose that on the Red Lake District, there would be over 100 million ounces that have been produced or defined in resources. And so what we're looking at here is. It's looking, it has serious district scale gold potential. It's very important for us when we talk about the project that this is a partnership between our French team and the Canadians, and in fact the French team is the guys that originated this property and the fellow that you see in the middle on the left is Thomas Poatrino. He's our VP exploration and runs all the program in France. He grew up in this region. His father is a farmer in this region, and his father took him into the mine. When he was a boy, a young boy, and he showed them what this project was like when it was in operation. So this is back in 2002 before it closed down. They used to have public tours, and Thomas saw it then, and it was in the back of his mind. And so as a boy, he saw it. He later became a PhD geologist, and he had a mission, which is a, it's still a mission that's very close to his heart, which is to bring back active mining into France. And that's a mission that we really strive to support. And so. It's a funny story. Like when Thomas came up with the idea, he found Yves Guise and Michel Moon, and these are French partners of his. Yves Guies is a very well recognized mining engineer. He was with Charbonne de France, and he put a number of different coal mines into production and out of production from the 1960s to the 1990s. He recently was awarded, for instance, a medal from the French state last year recognizing his contribution to mining in the country. And Michel does everything in France that is not mining or engineering related. Well, these guys were sending random emails to people through their LinkedIn network, and they said, hello, introduced themselves. Is anybody interested in a multi-million ounce gold project in France? And of course, they got a variety of responses, but one of the people that they reached out to was on our board, Earl McMaster. He contacted, John Robbins, David Sadowski, other board members of ours, and ultimately they were doing some initial financings to get this project, financed. To do the permitting and get everything going. And so, that's Earl. he received the first email. He sent it over to Dave, and my partners in the company are John Robbins and Jim Peterson. They've been with the Discovery Group, group of companies out of Vancouver for a long time, along with myself. we did recruit a director, Hugh Jackman, who's a Belgian fellow who lives in Italy, but he's on the board of Canadian Graphite, very well connected, with French, administration. And so these guys, we've put together the capital and we've helped really finance, helped finance the French team's activities. This is a Discovery group. We have worked all over the world. we've done over $5 billion in M&A activity. We've raised over a billion dollars to fund that work. We've worked in 20 countries and we've won a number of different industry awards, so. Important to us here is this EU strategic metal, legislation that's been brought into focus, and we want to be part of, solving, really this like EU strategic metal, Initiative that's been put into place and so a project like ours here in France which has gold but also has a critical metal assemblage is really ideal for advancing this because if you think about it, gold is ultimately the element that pays for everything else. So a project like this that has high grade antimony as well in certain deposits around the property, it's one of the most efficient ways to develop assets like that is to make sure that they come along, you know, with significant gold in this case. This is the history of the project, very, very succinctly. So there was at least, if you read the archaeological reports and you look at the different mining sites that were here on the property, there was at least 2.5 million ounces of gold that were produced in the pre-Roman period. So I really love history. I love archaeology. For instance, when I got married, I went on honeymoon in France, but we didn't spend time in Paris. I took my wife to different archaeological sites all around the country, and she knew what she was getting into when she married me, right? So, we went to Elysia. I had just finished reading Caesar's Conquest of Gaul at the time, so I was like, probably enjoying this element of the honeymoon more than anything else, re-envisioning like the, the circumvallation of. Yes, 30 years later I am still married. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did it. And so I, I, I really like that. I, you know, so it's a Limavise's tribe that was in, that was mining all this stuff here, and they were probably the most significant gold miners in France and one of the interesting. I'll get off this tangent in a second, but a lot of the Romans, when they were mining, they would mine soft rock coasted gold, and so they're really good at this, just putting slave labor and doing a lot of sluicing work. This is mostly in silicified breeches and quartz veins, so it was really too hard for the Romans to go after it, but they're very rich gold deposits. In any case, early 1900s, Lindsay Thayer comes over from Canada. There's French mining entrepreneurs. They produce about 300,000 ounces of gold at about a 20,000 per ton cutoff grade. When Kajima's in there, they mined about a million ounces at a cutoff grade of about 12 g. So the average mining grade was about 0.5 ounce, and one of our missions on the project is just to see if you think about it from logical cutoff grades now of a couple grams per ton, how much material really is there in the ground, and I think there would be very Significant resource potential similar to what we put together in Great Bear when that project was purchased internally. We had modeled about 3.5 to 3.7 million ounces of about 4.5 g per ton of gold, and I think we can see that already coming together around just one of the areas of this project. This is what the gold looks like. It's orthanice and paraise hosted gold in quartz veins and stockworks, so it's coarse visible gold that came out at really high recovery levels like in the mid 90%, and the key factor here is there's over 200 kilometers of gold bearing structures on the property. So it's truly district scale in that sense. And this is more pictures of the gold, I'll go through this quickly, but that's, again, if you go to the project, if you're ever visiting in the area, let us know and we're happy to show people around, but it's very impressive specimens of gold. These are results from some of the early drilling that we've done. so we've finished now. We're actually up to 12,000 m. We've put 41 holes in, over the last like 16 months, more or less, and those are some of the results. Like what you get is in the middle of these gold bearing structures, you get very high grade gold. That's an example, probably the best hole so far, 350 g over 1 meter.5 within an envelope of just over 1 ounce over 15.5 m. And that was a 70 m step up from some of the past production, and then we did a 70 m step down and you hit, I think it's around 0.5 ounce per ton over about 20 m. And so our, our job here, this is, just keep in mind this, this long section in front of you is about 2.5 kilometers long. But that network of faults that you see traced out in green on the property outline, that's over 200 kilometers of gold bearing structures. It's difficult to see on this image. I do have better ones that show it as well, but there's over 900 open pit mining sites which are strung out along those structures. And for instance, if you look at the gold and soil data that was collected by Kajima, you can see that that's that colorful map on the bottom right. that is a continuously gold mineralized structural system, which is over 25 kilometers long. And so, when you think about that. On the great bear story, when we were working in Ontario, we had one structure that was 20 kilometers long, and now there's going to be, my guess is well over 10 million ounces that ends up getting produced off of that. Here we have over 200 kilometers long of gold bearing structures, and there are mines lined up along all those structures. So it's literally an order of magnitude larger than my last project that we had in Ontario. Also interesting here and probably very important from the EU perspective is that there's quite a bit of antimony that comes along with the mineralization, which is a critical metal according to the EU. And there's another generation of mineralization which is high grade polymetallic sulfides which cut across, and that's a system of dikes that's well known in the Massif Central. These were intersected when they began mining down to like about 300 m depth, you know, in the 1990s. The miners began hitting this stuff, and we've drilled some of this now, so there'll be some news out about that in the near term. But it's, also because it's silver, lead, zinc, antimony, it's also a critical metal importance, and that should help us access some of that critical metal funding. So when we do exploration around the project, one of the important things is the company acquired a very large database when they when they acquired the project. And so this came from Orano because Orano is the is the ultimate owner of the surface rights in some places, and they're the Successor to Kajima, the past operator, and so they had stockpiled material from underground, which was face samples and assays from what they were mining, and you can see there, there's very significant lead zinc, antimony in some of that polymetallic sulfide that I showed you. We've subsequently followed up and done. Exploration around that 330 square kilometers and we're finding very similar polymetallic mineralization in different places too. And of course if you look at these results, some of the highest grade gold and silver that were taken out from the underground mining was in the kilo per ton range. So like there you go, 2.4 kg per ton gold, 2.3 kg per ton silver. It's very interesting to get back to archaeology, but when you look at the coinage that the Limoviss were producing in this area, it's largely like, it's like an electrum amalgam of like gold and silver. So you can actually, I've read some reports on tracing the coinage back to individual ore bodies in this region. You can do it based on the gold to silver ratio. This is why the system is developed. If you look at this image here, this is our project from Ontario, and the only reason I'm standing here today and anybody who listens to any of the nonsense that I'm spouting is because we collected this data from the government in Ontario and Canada. And we saw the seismic data and we saw on the right, the Red Lake complex, there was like over 100 million ounces that have been defined or produced from that, you know, Rob McEwen's, Red Lake mine, for instance. But the other fault, the LP fault zone, this was open ground. And so it was unstaked. So when you look at the seismic data, you could see that there was all this gold that was developed on one structure, and the next structure, the neighboring structure in the region, nobody had staked it. And so we staked a 20 kilometer rectangle on top of that. That's that 120 kilometer LP fault zone. In the middle, 4.5 kilometers, we found the LP fault, and that's ultimately what made us famous. This is roughly at the same scale in the France project. There isn't one of these structures. There's 7. And so the potential of the project, like I said, you've gone from 120 kilometer target to over 200 kilometers of targets compressed into one area, and we know these are gold bearing structures because there's already mines along them all over the place. And so the scale of it comparably from 1 to 7 is. I mean, it's really what got me interested in this. It really is a world class, you know, gold district, and it really is, you know. Very significant potential. And so, the opportunity here is basically, the company does plan to go through an IPO process like later in, later in this year. And so, you know, we'll, we'll get some more drill results out. We're currently drilling with 2 drill rigs, and what we'd like to do is expand the number to 4. with over 900 targets that we have to go after, we could use the extra drills. And very simply, like if you're involved in mining projects elsewhere in the world, like I'm on the board of a great company, and it's in Suriname, and it's called Founders' Metals. And now Founders, one of the primary exploration methods is to go through that area and find where the artisanal mining is, right? So, you do this in Africa, you do this in South America, you do this in a lot of places. When I first looked at the data set from here, I said, where in my life have I ever seen a district where over a 330 square kilometer area, I would have 900 samples that were over 20 g per ton of gold. And that's what we're looking at with the French project because archaeologically, you know that those Celtic tribes could not see the gold if it was below about 2/3 of an ounce. Just archaeologically you're grinding it up, you're doing reconstructive work, you just can't see it. They're not going to mine material that's lower grade than that. And so the estimation is that was probably a rough cutoff grade and The average mining grade with that material was probably in the 20 to 80 g per ton range, because that's more typical of these ore bodies. And so, you can't do it. If you think of anywhere else that there's a project available, that you could be working on, you'll never find a concentration of that many high grade samples that are in one area with that kind of density. And that's what really sets this project apart. So. Could you have done this 10 years ago in France? I don't think so. 20 years ago it was in production, you know, in the early 2000s. could you have done it 10 years ago? No. But the geopolitical situation now is such that the EU, France, other countries in Europe are really focusing on bringing back. Some of this ability to produce a portion of what they need domestically and projects like this are ideal. And if you can go back into an area that was recently producing, it's even better than trying to start something off from scratch. And so I believe in that mission. I feel very strongly about it, and I want to be part of that solution. So just a couple of final notes here. This is the share ownership of Aquitaine. it's majority owned by management and directors, and so we own just under 60% on a fully diluted, basis. And so, the last raise that we did gave us a market cap of about $100 million. we do have enough cash to complete our drill program this year if we can. Keep with two rigs, but as I mentioned, we want to expand the program. And so now we're permitted for the drilling. The government just increased the area that we could be drilling from 40 square kilometers to 330 square kilometers. We like the moves that the French government is making for reprioritizing mining. They've switched it from, you know, the Ministry of the Environment to the Ministry of Industry and and Economics, so it's a very positive change in our view, and they're making all the right supportive gestures towards projects like this. So we want to expand what we're doing in the area. We want to drill some of the critical minerals like the antimony targets, and we're very excited about this, where, where this could go. So with that, I guess I could just wrap it up and take some questions. Any questions from the room? What's your, well, the last financing was at, $250 US and it gave us about $100 million market cap, but it's before we were doing any of the drilling, really, and it's before we did the expansion of the project from 40 to 300+ square kilometers. So I would imagine there'll be a bump up on the price somewhat. So I think, I think the way it's going to go is I think, because it'll take a while to get the IPO set, but I think we'll do a smaller, pre-IPO financing, probably in the summer. And that'll be a bit of a premium over the last one and then presumably if everything keeps going well, we'll do the, we'll do the IPO in September October and I can't tell you what the price is exactly, but generally when I see deals like this, there's usually about a 20, 20% spread or something between the pre-IPO and the IPO pricing, so I would. Well, I mean, like, depends what their motivation is, right? So, You know, I went through this process recently and, and I'm on the board of a company called Tiernan Resources, so that's got a project in Chile. So we did an RTO transaction and we did a pricing into the market initially and we ended up having to reprice like 50% below the offer price and then it went really well and the share price has since more than doubled since the company was launched. So I think you've got to hit a sweet spot. I think lesson learned. So the I bankers may. Encourage you to do a very high share price, and you want to capture that to avoid dilution, but you also want to do something that leaves immediate upside for your investors. And so we'll try to price it as fairly as possible. You're welcome. Any other questions? What is the French fiscal regime for mining? The fiscal regime like fees and royalties, how much tax they're going to take from you. So this is a good question. so this is the first question I asked when I showed up in France about 18 months ago. I still don't have an exact answer other than it's very small repetit. you know, and so the, the way that I can answer your question is there hasn't been a project that's been put into production for a very long time, right? So, I think right now it's de minimis in terms of royalties that are charged to the state. I wouldn't be surprised if the project is successful that they think about that a little bit more, but right now it's basically a royalty-free, production structure. Yeah, and I don't know about the tax regime yet. Yeah. That's another question at the back of the room. You were talking about surface rights versus mining rights. Yeah, and who controls that and in this case, who owns them. Yeah, so surface is owned by different, people, so it's different private, surface owners, usually small scale farmers. There's some forestry, in Orano, and so, we're drilling on some of the areas that are owned by Orano. That's where we started and then we've expanded into some of the fields and so. What you have to do to drill in the area is you have to negotiate an access agreement with the individual property owners, and the total, I'll just give you an idea, for the 1st 10,000 m that we drilled, it cost us in total between the various landowners about €50,000. So it's generally in the few €1000 range per access agreement, and we try to be a good neighbor by not forcing anything. Ultimately, the French state will own the mineral rights, other than the company that they give it to under agreement, and that means like, they could force, they could force people that are local landowners to, to grant access, but obviously that's not anybody's preference. You want to get into an agreement with the individual surface rights owners to compensate them fairly for like drilling on their property. So exploration agreement is what you have right now, yeah. And exploitation will be with exploitation is with the state. It's a direct agreement with the state and in the region itself separate regions have different rules. no, it's, it's one mining code for the whole, country, OK. They were supposed to update their mining codes. Have they? They did like Gilles, sorry, Gilles Yves Guise, who I showed you as the president of our sub, he was involved in helping, you know, give guidance on the new mining regulations. So there was a bunch of changes from 2023 to 2025. The main one is the transfer of where all the permitting is, which departments it's in, but the one that's even more important initially is that now you can permit, you do the environmental baseline work, the consultation work, and the program planning all in parallel as you advance the permits. Previously you had to do them in sequence, and so it should dramatically cut down the time that it takes. And there's been some positive developments in terms of court proceedings on old mining projects, and there was a, there was a reversion recently on a project that had previously been revoked, maybe 7 years ago or so. It's a tungsten asset in the Pyrenees. It had been removed, from the company's control by, basically a lawsuit in the courts and the state. Went, reviewed the files, and returned the asset to the company that had it. And so they're very serious. Like every level of government we talked to, they're very serious about bringing mining back as a viable industry in the country. What's the what are the French regs about use of cyanide? you can use cyanide, you're allowed to use cyanide. cyanide was used like in a tank format here to do the final recoveries on gold, so it is possible to do it. I wouldn't try to do open, open heat bleaching cyanide, that would be a suicidal enterprise. So I wouldn't try to do that in most parts of Canada either. So, yeah. Are there extensive dumps and tails from the old historic production as well? There is, yeah, they, they average about 3 g per ton, which might be the next part of your question. So it's one way we could conceivably be a good citizen is to reprocess all that material and clean, clean up anything that we can. OK, great. Thank you very much, Chris, and maybe just say at the end as well, thank you to.