NQ Minerals’ wholly-owned subsidiary, Hellyer Gold Mines, has entered into two marketing and off-take agreements, combined with a $10 million secured prepayment facility agreement with Traxys Europe. The marketing and offtake agreements relate to the sale of all the lead and zinc concentrates to be produced from the wholly-owned Hellyer project located in Tasmania and cover the first five years of concentrate production. The agreements provide Hellyer access to Traxys’s extensive global network and an experienced marketing and distribution team for base metal concentrates.

The prepayment facility, which is guaranteed by the company, provides flexible pre-production funding to enable the completion of refurbishment of the Hellyer plant and start up working capital.

Commenting, Brian Stockbridge, Non-Executive Chairman of NQ Minerals said, “This completes our start-up funding and creates a strong partnership with a leading global commodity trading organisation. Traxys provide us with commercial and logistic experience and expertise which complements our team as we progress towards a 2018 start of operations.”

Hellyer is based on the retreatment of tailings from previously mined VMS deposits in northwest Tasmania. These tailings host a JORC compliant Reserve of 8.05 Mt @ 2.57 g/t Au, 93 g/t Ag, 3.05% Pb and 2.55% Zn. The fully permitted retreatment project involves refurbishment of the existing site facilities in order to extract and reprocess the full resource into lead, zinc and precious metal concentrates at very low operating cost.

NQ Minerals acquired Hellyer in May 2017 and following engineering, project planning and fundraising activities commenced full time refurbishment of the dredging and processing plant in January 2018.

In addition to the Hellyer Project, NQ Minerals is developing the Ukalunda and Square Post properties in Northern Queensland.