Chesterfield shares double on surprising gold finds

Chesterfield Resources' shares doubled in value after the mineral explorer said it found surprisingly large amounts of gold at its copper operations in Cyprus.

The company said its technical team had found that its Troodos West licences covered an unusually gold-enriched belt and that gold was likely to be a significant revenue metal contained in copper-zinc sulphide resources.

Chesterfield shares more than doubled after the announcement and were up 100% to 3p at 13:03 BST.

The company said extracting gold was not economically viable during Cyprus's mining boom of the 1960s and 1970s because the price was pegged. Mining largely stopped after the 1974 Turkish invasion, which deterred gold explorers during a subsequent gold bull run.

Cypriot deposits are capable of producing clean, gold-rich copper mineral concentrates that are in increasingly high demand from smelters globally, Chesterfield said. With the gold price increasing during the Covid-19 crisis Chesterfield has had a number of investor enquiries about the potential for copper-gold exploration in Cyprus, the company added.

Martin French, Chesterfield's executive chairman, said: "Most of the targeted drilling for copper conducted by Chesterfield to date has encountered gold, often in quantities that have surprised us … We are looking forward to resume testing several of these targets with percussion drilling when the easing of Covid-19 restrictions permit. There is a considerable body of evidence for us to expect gold to be an important component of the programme."