Chaarat Gold Holdings Ltd (‘Chaarat’ or ‘the Company’) listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) on 8 November 2007 with the ticker symbol CGH.
The Chaarat Group was founded for the purpose of exploring and developing gold projects in a gold province in the western part of the Kyrgyz Republic. The Company has a 100% interest in the 604 square kilometre exploration licence, which covers an area of extensive gold mineralisation, within the Tien Shan Gold Belt.
The Licence was issued in December 2002 by the State Agency of Geology and Mineral Resources (SAGMR), initially for a period of two years and it granted exclusive rights to conduct geological prospecting and exploration for commodities including gold and other metals in the Licence Area. Since that time the Licence has been extended three times and the licence area increased from 439 square kilometres. The Company is entitled to apply for a further extension to the exploration licence in December 2010, before being obliged to apply for a mining licence.
Extensive prospecting has only been conducted on one of the three known clusters of gold occurrences within an area of approximately 48km2, referred to as the Chaarat Gold Project, which hosts many highly prospective gold occurrences. The two other prospective clusters which have been identified in the Licence area, Minteke and Kashkasu will be explored as soon as practical.
At the completion of the 2008 exploration season, a Mineral Resource of 3.34Moz at a grade of 4.30 g/t gold (JORC compliant in the Indicated and Inferred categories) had already been delineated. An revised resource report based on the 2009 work is expected during March 2010. The Company’s exploration programme is aimed at increasing the confidence levels in this Resource through infill drilling and increasing the resource through down-dip and along-strike extension drilling.
Following a positive independent Scoping Study by Behre Dolbear which confirmed the economic and technical viability of the project, a Pre-Feasibility Study by SRK Johannesburg is scheduled for completion in Q3 2010.