Gold Production in 2027, But Can The Grade Hold Past the Starter Pit? | Lake Victoria CEO Interview

**Antonio** (0:00)
This video is sponsored by Terrahutton, who makes the invisible, investible. Today on the CEO BBQ, advanced gold exploration in Tanzania with Lake Victoria Gold. But if you're short on time, subscribe to our free newsletter, and once a week, we'll send you a five-minute summary of all interviews we put out, resourcetalks.com for a free weekly newsletter. Now, although this company has not paid us for the production of this video, you should still understand that we are not financial advisors, and this is not intended as financial advice. It is a broad, general, and impersonal piece of information intended only for those who know and understand the risks of junior mining, of which there are many. Before moving on, read the company's official filings on Sitterplus.ca and do your own due diligence. Pause the screen and read all the disclaimers I've shown you because your capital is at risk. If this isn't clear, go to the last section of this video for a longer explanation of the risks and biases, and do not consume this content if you don't agree with everything said therein. Moving on, Lake Victoria's flagship Imwelo project is again in Tanzania, and it's about 12 kilometers west of Angola Gold, Ashanti's Gaita mine, specifically within the Gaita Greenstone belt. As you might expect for this part of the world, the mineralization here is a classic share hosted Quartz Vane Gold, and the company holds a fully permitted mining license on it, which of course, we'll talk about later on.
But it is a big part of the strategy, so we'll definitely mention that and ask some questions about it. Historical JORC work on it from 2017 defined about 300,000 ounces of gold across the measured, indicated and inferred categories. Again, it was done by an Aussie private co-so it is JORC, but it is historic, so it's not up to modern NI 43.101 standards. It needs work. We'll definitely be asking some questions about that. Right now, Lake Victoria is pushing development forward with drilling at Area C, where they're going to be testing expansion, sterilization holes for plant and infrastructure sites and whatnot. And then also recent metallurgical tests have shown recoveries up to 97% on the material. But of course, we'll mention or we'll ask a couple of questions about the MET work here as well. The main short-term catalyst here are the continued de-risking work throughout the rest of 2026 And that's all really being done to support a construction decision, hopefully sometime soon and then also first gold potentially in 2027, if the remaining funding and technical steps line up, which of course we'll be asking about later on as well.
Besides that project, by the way, they also have a second project called the Tembo Project. They used to be called the companies and the company used to have the same name before. It's right next door to Beric's mine that has a name that's almost too hard for me to pronounce. So I'm not even going to try at this point.
And I doubt we'll have the time to do a deep dive on this asset today, but we will ask for a brief update on it in the latter part of the conversation. Now for some of the numbers and a bit of the details, Lake Victoria is listed as LVG, so Lake Victoria Gold, on the TSX-V in Canada, where the average daily volume over the last three months has been about 300,000 units. The 52-week high is 36 cents and a 52-week low is 16 cents. With a little over 195 million shares outstanding a $54 million market cap today, this is a 27-cent stock with a 50 and a 200-day moving average at 29 and 25 cents respectively. So the stock is not trading between those two. There are just over 17 million warrants and 14.3 million RSUs to get a representing about 14% of the fully diluted 226.5 million shares.
The last time they closed the financing was a non-broker private placement of debt, actually. So it's unsecured convertible debt closed on May 20, 26 raising close to $4 million. Well, the plans are to upsize that potentially to $5 million Canadian dollars. Again, this is debt though, so it carries an annual coupon. Again, it's an annual interest, 5% payable in semi-annually pieces and it matures in 36 months. So in three years, and it is convertible, so it converts into common shares at $0.30 per share. There's also a warrant with that deal equal to 50% of the conversion shares, exercise about $0.40 per share with, again, that the same three-month period, so 36 months, resulting in 6.4 million warrants issued in total. How much money do they have right now?