Pan Australian ships gold

On November 23, Pan Australian Resources completed the first gold shipment from its Phu Bia gold mine in Laos. Managing Director Gary Stafford said the heap leach mine had ramped up to its design ore mining and processing rate of 1.5 Mt/y and had already built a stockpile inventory of 260,000 t of ore grading 1.6 g/t and containing over 12,000 oz of recoverable gold. “The mine has the capacity to produce over the name plate design of 60,000 oz/y of gold and early signs are that we are going to be able to ramp-up gold production to the design rate over the next several months,” he said. “I believe that we should be able to produce 60,000 oz of gold in 2006 calendar year at cash costs of around $200/oz, which will give us an extremely healthy margin over the prevailing gold price of plus $490/oz.”

Stafford said the company’s exploration program was very aggressive, with encouraging initial drilling results at the Phu He Gold-Silver Prospect near Phonsavan in the north of the Contract Area. “We are keen to expand our gold business and increase our ore reserves and therefore the initial results from Phu He are exciting. “At the Phu He Prospect we have intersected very high gold and silver grades including 10 m at 14.6 g/t gold and 198 g/t silver from a depth of only 52 m,” he said. Phu He is a high-grade epithermal vein system which shares similar geological characteristics to

the Chatree Gold Deposit in Thailand.

Pan Australian has awarded a mandate to ANZ Investment Bank to arrange the debt financing for the Phu Kham copper-gold project, a development that could produce 50,000 t of copper and 50,000 oz of gold per annum from late 2007. A development decision is pending completion of optimisation work on a feasibility study on the Phu Kham Project in March 2006.