The shaft head at Village’s Tau Lekoa mine

Johannesburg, South Africa --- 13 June 2012 - Village Main Reef ‒ whose strategy is to create self sustaining, socially responsible mining entities ‒ has completed the pre-feasibility study revealing a robust mining business case at its Lesego platinum project, situated near Burgersfort in the Limpopo province.

Lesego was acquired last year by Village Main Reef in the first significant step to rebuild itself into a self-sustaining mining company. This acquisition transformed Village to one of the top performing shares on the JSE by financial year end 2010, from its’ previously ‘curtailed operation status’

The company said at the time that it was confident that Lesego would become a US$1 billion project producing more than 200,000ozpa of PGM’s by 2016. It added that current data suggested that a second shaft could double this output in the longer-term future.

In a press announcement here, Village expressed greater confidence in the ore body after completion of its drilling programme which moved 65% of the ore body into the measured and indicated categories. The ore body had been defined from300m below surface compared to 700m previously, and the updated resource estimate reported a reserve of 39.03Moz 3PGE+Au in 204 Mt of ore. In addition, the resource contains combined nickel and copper of 600,000t.

The updated mineral resource estimation was based on borehole data generated from a database compiled by the specialist mining consultants, MSA Geoservices (Pty) Limited (MSA) of all available data from previous and present drill campaigns up to 31 March 2012. It had been prepared by MSA in accordance with the SAMREC Code.

This latest database included the results from 116,590m of drilling, of which 13,973m had been from the 2007/8 drilling and 102,618m from the 2011/12 boreholes. In total 1,704m of core had been assayed for platinum group elements, as well as nickel and copper.

The Village statement added that the updated mineral resource was supported by the completed pre-feasibility study revealing a robust mining business case returning an IRR of 18.7% and an NPV of R6.7 billion

Source: Village Main Reef. For more information, click here.