The Karouni Gold Project deposits are situated on the west-northwest trending Greenstone Belts of the Palaeoproterozoic Barama-Mazaruni Supergroup interspersed with extensive Granitoid Batholiths also of Trans-Amazonian age. Basement lithologies in the project area are partially obscured by a veneer of Tertiary to Holocene sedimentary cover.

Primary gold mineralisation is exposed at several localities within the Karouni Project, the most notable being the Hicks, Smarts and Larken Zones along the northern extremity of the project. Here the White Sand Formation cover has been removed by erosion to expose the underlying mineralised Palaeoproterozoic greenstone successions of the Trans-Amazonian Barama-Mazaruni Group.

Gold mineralisation within the Karouni Gold Project comprises mesothermal quartz, quartz-carbonate, quartztourmaline structurally controlled lodes, veins, stockworks and breccia zones variously hosted by Mafic to Intermediate Volcanics and Volcanoclastics, Carbonaceous Shales and syntectonic Granitoid Stocks. Gold is commonly accompanied by pyrite and less commonly arsenopyrite, in the latter instance particularly where hosted by Carbonaceous Shales and Phyllites. In essence, the style of mineralisation is entirely consistent with similar gold-bearing Archaean and Palaeoproterozoic greenstone terrains world-wide. Gold workings associated with recent alluvial deposits are notable along virtually all streams and rivers throughout the project area ........

Mining at Karouni uses conventional open pit mining methods with 50t hydraulic excavators and 40t articulated dump trucks. A total of 189,000t of ore and approximately 4.1Mt of waste have been mined from start up in November 2014 to December 2015. The mine plan includes extraction of ore from three separate deposits, Smarts, Hicks and Larken, by open pit mining, and an underground mine at Smarts. The Smarts deposit is approximately 1km north of the run of mine (“ROM”) stockpile and process plant (Figure 5). Hicks deposit is approximately 3km south of the ROM stockpile; Larken deposit is approximately 2.5km east of the ROM stockpile.

The pits at Smarts and Hicks are made up of a number of staged pits. The underground mine plan is based on a conceptual plan to extract the deeper high grade resources below the Smarts open pits with standard mechanised mining equipment accessed via a decline from the bottom of Smarts 3 pit applying Avoca underground mining methods.

Total open pit ore mined in the LOM schedule is 3.9Mt at a grade of 3.1g/t Au containing 396 thousand ounces (“kozs”) of gold. Underground ore mining is scheduled to commence in 2017 and continue over a four year period with a total of 0.81Mt mined at a grade of 5.0g/t Au containing 131kozs Au. This underground inventory includes Inferred and unclassified resources which comprise approximately 40% of the total scheduled ore.

The mining inventory from both open pit and underground f ........

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