Troubleshooter turns fortunes of goldmine around in one year
THE chief of Scotland’s only commercial goldmine has hailed the turnaround of the facility’s fortunes as it heads towards doubling production by the end of the year.
It comes after the mine north of Loch Lomond was shut down by Covid-19 in 2020, which also restricted access to specialist suppliers and consultants from overseas as well as recruitment and training of staff.
After seven years at the helm, chief executive Richard Gray stood down from Scotgold, the London-listed mining company, with Western Australian industry veteran Phil Day, taking on the role in April 2021.
Quarter of a century in mining across commodities ranging from gold to fertiliser, Mr Day was in at the start of the mid-2000s nickel boom and is a former head of technical and operations at Switzerland-based Pala Investments.
He has mined in Vietnam, West Africa, Brazil, Australia and Kazakhstan, travelling over 300,000 miles one year.
Within two months of Mr Day joining the Cononish operation, it was updating the City that technical issues with which it had been beset were resolved.
Over the year, shares have risen from 49.5p to 65p, and last month it achieved record levels of gold concentrate production, at over 160 tonnes.
Mr Day was parachuted in shortly after completing a copper mine venture in Nevada.
“I thought I was going to have a two month break, it turned out to be four weeks, and I got tapped on the shoulder to go over to Scotgold, to do very much the same thing, to start, or effectively get that company from where it was, because at that particular time it was sitting not doing a whole lot, not making any revenue, you name it there were problems everywhere,” he said. “So I was called in to fix the whole thing. Really in one year it has gone from a going concern to now being the operating success that it is.”
It now has around 80 employees. It has brought in specialists from South Africa and Australia to train and recruit, with most staff from Scotland.
“It is making money, there’s lots of gold, we are employing very happy people,” said Mr Day.
He had to tap into his wealth of experience to reach this stage.
“With the background I’ve had and because I have had exposure to everything and anything in different commodities, different countries, different languages, different cultures, different technologies, as soon as I got to Scotgold it was easy just to literally translate allof those into one thing and get this thing up and running,” he said.
“It is not an easy place to run. It is technically very complex and there are very few people who have experience of doing that. I just happened to have about three years doing that when I was over in Nevada.”
With the high quality gold mined from the Argyll site comes high level responsibility for the surrounding environment.
“We have got an extremely small footprint and that is a badge of honour.
We don’t use the process like other gold mines do around the world. As a result we can say we sell gold that is very clean from an industry perspective.”
Mr Day also tapped into what he says is among the best gold seams in the world. “Our reserve grade is just under 12 grams per tonne. I am used to one gram per tonne. I’ve never seen that before, so it is incredibly impressive.”
“We have a lot more scope to expand,” he added. “We have a mandate to double the size of the mine that it is currently.”
The product is so far getting a good response.
“The more I test that market and put it out there for sale, people seem to ring me and want a Scottish coin or Scottish jewellery, anything as long as I can prove it was derived from Scotland,” said Mr Day.