Prophecy Platinum appoints new COO as it assembles new team

Prophecy Platinum Corp. (CVE:NKL)(OTCQX:PNIKF) appointed Thursday professional engineer John Sagman as its senior vice president and chief operating officer. 

The company said it is in the process of assembling a new leadership team with proven expertise in the operation of successful mining projects, and will have executive-level appointments to announce in the near future. 

Sagman has over thirty years of mining experience including the design, development, commissioning and management of both open pit and underground mining projects.             

Prior to joining Prophecy, he held the position of VP of technical services with Capstone Mining, where he was responsible for overseeing reserve estimates, prefeasibility studies, and improvement of technical processes. 

Specifically, Sagman led phase V and phase VI prefeasibility studies at the Minto copper-gold mine approximately 150km northeast from Prophecy's Wellgreen deposit in the Yukon. 

Prophecy noted that Minto is an open pit mine that produced 37 million pounds of copper in 2011.                 

Sagman has also held roles at Vale Inco and Xstrata Nickel. 

At Vale, he was the senior project manager for the Tottten Nickel-copper-PGM mine in Sudbury, Ontario - around 30km east of Prophecy's Shakespeare mine. 

Prior to Vale and Xstrate, Sagman spent 10 years with Placer Dome, acting as senior mining engineer at the Gibraltar open pit mine. 

"His extensive experience developing, building and operating Nickel-PGM and open pit mines in northern climates will be invaluable to Prophecy as it continues the development of the Wellgreen Project in the Yukon," Prophecy said in a statement. 

Last month, the Vancouver-based company said it hired engineering consultants to start environmental baselines studies this fall at its Wellgreen platinum group metals-Nickel-copper project in the southwestern part of Yukon.

The company said it signed a contract with EBA Engineering Consultants, a Tetra Tech company from Whitehorse, to carry out the work, which will include the collection of meteorological data, surface water quality and analysis of recent wildlife studies. 

The platinum miner noted that the Yukon Enivronment and Socio-economic Assessment Board requires roughly two years of baseline data as part of the overall quartz mining permit application - which Prophecy aims to submit by 2015. 

Prophecy's Wellgreen is located in the south west of Canada's mining-friendly Yukon Territory, approximately 35 kilometres northwest of the airstrip at Burwash Landing, just 15 km from the Alaska Highway and 402 km from the deep sea port of Haines in Alaska.

A July 2011, NI 43 101-compliant report provides a resource estimate of 289 million tonnes in the inferred category with grades of 0.38% Nickel, 0.35% copper, 1.18 grams per tonne (g/t) PGM and gold, and 14 million tonnes in the indicated category at 0.69%Nickel, 0.62% copper, 2.25 g/t PGM and gold.

In June, Prophecy Platinum released the PEA for the project, which showed Wellgreen had a net present value of $3.0 billion.

The economic report, prepared by Tetra Tech, evaluated a base case open pit mine at an 111,500 tonne per day mining rate, and an onsite concentrator at a 32,000 tonne per day milling rate. 

The project is expected to produce 1.959 billion pounds of Nickel in concentrate, 2.058 billion pounds of copper and 7.119 million ounces of platinum plus palladium plus gold over a 37-year mine life, with an average strip ratio of 2.57.

Aside from Wellgreen, Prophecy also holds the Shakespeare platinum group metals-Nickel-copper project in Ontario, and its Lynn Lake project in Manitoba.