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Strickland will distribute 80 per cent of the consideration shares to existing Strickland shareholders.
The transaction required approvals from shareholders of both companies and included transferring any joint venture obligations, along with necessary regulatory nods.
It was completed in mid-August, allowing Strickland to refocus on its international projects, including its Serbian Rogozna gold-copper project, while retaining about 15.7 per cent of Gateway’s shares (300 million ordinary shares after conversion) for ongoing exposure to Yandal’s potential.
The timing is sharp – less than two months after Gateway completed a $22.5 million capital raise and pocketed another $12.1m in cash and liquid assets via a previous deal with Brightstar Resources.
Gateway appears to be sharply focused on chasing a standalone discovery with scale. The company has already kicked off aircore drilling at the Mustang prospect, located on one of several underexplored shear zones within Yandal.
The rig is scheduled to punch 44,000 metres of drilling into targets along an 8km stretch of ground, including where it converges with the regional Celia Shear, one of WA’s major crustal-scale deep linear structures associated with many mining operations. The campaign has been significantly upsized from the 25,000m originally flagged.
A second diamond rig is on the way to the Dusk ’til Dawn target, another high-priority target that has already delivered a JORC-compliant estimated resource of 3,495,000 tonnes (Mt) at 1.52 grams per tonne gold (g/t) for 108,900 gold ounces.
The estimate covers a 400-metre strike length to a depth of 200 metres.
At Mustang, Gateway is drilling directly into the contact zone between felsic and mafic-intermediate volcanics which is the same style of contact that hosts the company’s higher-grade Warmblood and Palomino resources just a few kilometres south.
But the structural complexity at Mustang, particularly where the Celia Shear and Mustang Shear corridors intersect and flex around three intrusions, is what sets it apart.
The trend, dubbed the Mustang-Pony corridor, is peppered with large-scale dilational zones considered highly prospective for gold mineralisation. Despite its promise, previous explorers only tested the weathered profile with wide-spaced, shallow vertical RAB drilling, a typical approach for early scout evaluation.
The current campaign is Gateway’s first attempt to systematically drill through cover and test the basement.
Gateway’s Yandal Project currently boasts a JORC Inferred Resource of 8.17 million tonnes at 1.52 grams per tonne gold for 400,400 ounces with nearly three-quarters of that housed within the Horse Well Gold Camp. That includes Palomino (129,500oz), Warmblood (126,000oz), Filly (21,500oz) and Bronco (14,500oz), all of which are grouped around the same structural corridor.
But the company believes its best growth lies ahead, particularly in the parts of the shear corridor that remain undrilled or shallowly tested. Of particular note is the 7.5km-long anomalous trend at Dusk ’til Dawn, where a geochemically significant suite of gold-moly-copper-bismuth-tellurium (Au-Mo-Cu-Bi-Te) pathfinders is associated with a sanukitoid intrusion – a rare and fertile geological setting.
A three dimensional induced polarisation (3D IP) survey is also nearing completion at the target, with diamond drilling to follow.
More broadly, Gateway now holds a vast tract of demonstrably prospective ground across the Yandal Greenstone Belt, much of which remains underexplored.
It also retains exposure to the Glenburgh South and Barrelmaker gold projects, the latter being within trucking distance of five gold mills. Additionally, the company’s position in WA’s Earaheedy Basin, through its 80 per cent stake in the Iroquois zinc-lead project, adds further optionality.
The new management in place at Gateway clearly believe in the company’s project suite too. In the recent $22.5 million capital raising supporting Gateway’s exploration at the Yandal gold project, Gateway Mining’s executive chairman Andrew Bray picked up $1 million in shares, with other directors and related parties also contributing, for a total of $1.675 million.
But Bray wasn’t finished there, following through with on-market purchases of Gateway shares to the tune of another $8m within a month - a serious vote of confidence if ever there was one.
And this is not Bray’s first rodeo on WA’s rich Yandal region either.
Bray retired as CEO of Strickland Metals upon the completion of the company’s acquisition of the Rogozna Gold Project in Serbia, announced to the ASX on July 2, 2024, with the deal formally closing on July 1, 2024. The transition also saw Paul L’Herpiniere appointed concurrently as the new managing director.
Strickland’s closing share price on the following day was 15c. Since then, Strickland’s share price has risen to 16.5c and the company’s market cap is now above $370M.
And it hasn’t taken long, for Gateway’s shares to begin moving, too, up about 200 per cent to 7.9c from 2.6c in mid-August.
For all the gold smoke in this district, what Gateway needs now is a blazing inferno to launch it into the stratosphere.
Between the Mustang-Pony corridor, the Dusk ’til Dawn deposit and a fresh geological view through the lens of the management crew that helped build the portfolio in the first place and did the bulk of the work to define Gateway’s 400,400 ounce Yandal, that fire might not be far off.
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