Solomon Capital offer for Metals Exploration becomes wholly unconditional

Solomon Capital has today announced that the acceptance condition to its mandatory cash offer for Metals Exploration (LON:MTL) has been satisfied and the offer was now fully unconditional.
The offer, which was made on 23 July, valued the company at £35.76 million, or 13 pence per share.
The acceptance condition was the only condition to the offer for the share capital of Metals Exploration not already owned by Solomon.

The total number of shares in Metals Exploration held by Solomon together with those under acceptances now stands at 145.6 million representing 53.97% of the company.

Guernsey incorporated Solomon Capital was established in December 2008, as an investment vehicle for property millionaire Christian Candy. The mandatory offer was triggered by a transaction for a single share, which took Solomon’s total associated holdings to 44.1% of the issued share capital.
Assuming a successful completion of the takeover, Solomon intends to continue working with Metals Exploration’s existing management team, to secure appropriate funding the company’s Runruno mine development in the Philippines.
Runruno has a JORC-compliant resource of 1.42 Moz of gold and 25.6 Mlb (million pounds) of molybdenum.
Metals Exploration has confirmed an independently verified proven & probable mining reserve consisting of 780,000 oz gold and secured an environmental compliance certificate in March 2010.
The results of feasibility study of Runruno confirmed the viability of a project producing an average of 96,700 oz of gold per annum over 10.4 years with an estimated average operating cost of US$477/oz not including potential molybdenum credits.
In late August, Solomon Capital provided Metals Exploration with a £2 million ‘on-demand’ short-term credit facility.