Advertisements placed at the start of this month in the London papers that the goldminer may be on the receiving end of a Russian-funded bailout lifted the London Stock Exchange share price for less than 24 hours.
The market capitalization has since continued on its trajectory towards worthlessness. Kirill Androsov of Altera Capital, the door-opener for a fresh Sberbank financing, is refusing to say which way the door is swinging. Low grade and tough metallurgy. Gentle euthanasia is the best option. The story of how Hambro and Maslovsky converted a fareastern Russian gold deposit called Pokrovsky from a Magadan region shareholder business into one of their own has been told here and here.
It has also been untold in the prospectuses the duo have issued in London and Hong Kong to attract international market money and shareholders. In the history of Petropavlovsk formerly Peter Hambro Mining , Hambro and Maslovsky were accused by Oleg Mitvol right , then the mine licence regulator at the federal Ministry of Natural Resources, of violating licence terms and mining the stock market β boosting the share price rather than investing in goldmining.
Mitvol ended up losing his post. Maslovsky became a senator in the Federation Council representing Amur until he withdrew to rejoin the management of the goldminer last month. Mining analysts say the problem for Petropavlovsk is in the ground, not in the management. Its ore deposits are reported to have the lowest gold-bearing grades in the Russian goldmining sector. Rivals Polyus Gold, Polymetal and Kinross report double or higher grades at their mines.
At the same time, Petropavlovsk cash costs of extracting its metal and taking it to market are among the highest in the Russia gold sector. So long as the market price of gold remained high, Petropavlovsk could cope with the financial squeeze. But if gold drops faster than it is possible for the mining company to reduce its costs, the squeeze becomes a stranglehold. The company papers claim it can count on increasing its output of gold this year, and cut the cost of producing it.
