Batero Gold announces special warrant financing

Batero Gold Corp. (CVE:BAT) said late Wednesday that it has agreed to a special warrant private placement offering.
Under the agreement, Raymond James and Cormark Securities have agreed to purchase special warrants by way of a private placement at a price to be determined in the context of the market, the company said.
The company has also granted the underwriters an option to acquire additional special warrants at any time up to 30 days following the closing date at the issue price, to cover over-allotments, if any.
Each special warrant will entitle the holder to acquire, for no additional consideration, one unit, consisting of one common share and one-half of one common share purchase warrant.
Each whole warrant entitles the holder to acquire an additional common share the period ending two years following the closing of the offering.
The new funds raised will be used to advance the company's 100 percent owned Batero-Quinchia project by completing a preliminary economic assessment, including additional drilling and metallurgical work, as well as for working capital and general corporate purposes.
The placement is scheduled to close around April 26, 2012, subject to certain conditions.
In late March, Batero unveiled information on the oxide resource potential and metallurgical test work contained in its NI 43-101 compliant technical report recently filed for its Batero-Quinchia project in Colombia.
As part of Batero’s planned 2012 work program to evaluate the potential of a high grade development option at the La Cumbre porphyry deposit in the southern area of the mineral resources at the project, the company will look to improve project economics through low cost heap leach mineral processing, it said.
The company will also advance metallurgical test work and deposit modeling to increase oxide resources, gold grade and recovery.
The next stage of metallurgical testing should investigate means for improving cyanidation recovery.  The company said a test program will be undertaken to better understand the relationship between gold and sulphur grades with respect to gold recovery.
Within the technical report filed earlier in March, it showed zones of higher grade oxide resources, grading more than 1 gram per tonne (g/t) gold near surface at La Cumbre and at 11.42 g/t gold over 5.8 metres adjacent to the deposit, remain open to delineate.
Batero's $8 million, 12-month work program for the project in 2012 includes 15,000 metres of drilling, and an updated resource estimate within a PEA for the La Cumbre area of the property.