Inca Minerals (ASX:ICG) has entered into a binding bid implementation agreement to acquire public unlisted Australian exploration company Stunalara Metals via an off-market takeover bid.
If successful, Stunalara shareholders will be issued 300 million fully paid Inca shares, accounting for about a 22.6% shareholding post bid assuming no other shares are issued.
Steinepreis Paganin is acting as legal advisor to Inca. EMK Lawyers is acting as legal advisor to Stunalara.
Stunalara has engaged an independent expert to advise its shareholders on the fairness and reasonableness of the offer as Inca director Andrew Haythorpe is also Stunalara’s Managing Director and holds a 18.6% shareholding. As such, Stunalara has also established an independent board committee.
At a deemed Inca share price of $0.006, the bidimplies a value of $1.8 million for Stunalara (fully diluted).
Inca CEO Trevor Benson says having carefully considered a number of acquisition proposals since he was appointed as CEO in 2024, “it became abundantly clear that Stunalara was a standout opportunity”.
“Its high-grade gold and gold-antimony Hurricane Project in North Queensland presents a unique opportunity to explore a project with multiple strongly mineralised veins which have historical workings but have never been drilled,” Benson says.
“In addition, the under-exploited Mt Reid project in Western Tasmania is located in an area where multiple significant precious and base metal deposits have been discovered, developed and mined over the last 100 years.”
With projects in Queensland, Tasmania, and Western Australia, Stunalara’s key asset is the “high-grade” gold-antimony Hurricane exploration project in North Queensland that has multiple undrilled high-grade gold & gold-antimony prospects developed from rock chip and grab sampling.
The Hurricane project is located in a gold-rich province, though the project itself has been lightly explored. It sits in the Queensland Government’s New Economy Minerals Initiative Corridor (November 2019) and having been under-explored is an attractive area to apply modern exploration techniques.
Hurricane is centrally located within the northwest-southeast trending geological structures, which hosts numerous gold occurrences, including Anglo Saxon and Fine Gold Creek in the northwest, to the Belfast Hill and Leadingham gold occurrences in the southeast.
Stunalara has a local team in place which allows for rapid execution of exploration programs.
The public unlisted Australian exploration company is also preparing to conduct exploratory operations for precious and base metals within the south-western region of Western Australia. In the first instance, these metals include gold, nickel, cobalt, copper and zinc.
The general area is situated within the Shire of Manjimup to the south of Unicup, and from what data is known shows considerable promise in this regard. The general area currently has both live and pending tenement applications within it.
At this stage Stunalara is in the very early stages of its exploration operations for these precious and base metals. The company has pending exploration applications for four tenements in close proximity to each other.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: Inca
