The guard at Heritage Gold in NZ

The founder of New Zealand’s most durable gold explorer, Peter Atkinson, is to step down from Heritage Gold (NZ) Ltd (ASX: HTM, NZX: HGD).

The New Zealand and Australian-listed company has announced Atkinson and other veteran directors will step down in what is clearly a move to create a new management broom for the Auckland-domiciled company.

Atkinson, an Australian geologist, started the company in 1985 after visiting the Coromandel Peninsula of NZ’s North Island and seeing the scope to establish new epithermal gold projects in areas where in the late 1800s gold miners helped give the country some economic clout.

Joining him in stepping down are founding independent director David Williams, and Ralph Stagg.

Key shareholder Geoffrey G. Hill will replace Murray McKee as chairman and McKee will assume the role of deputy chairman. Hill was put in the business spotlight with his handling a recovery mode for the Bell Group after the disastrous phase of Alan Bond’s management (including the transfer of $A1 billion [$US780.8 M] out of subsidiary Bell Resources that ended up burnt in the funeral pyre of Bond Corporation).

Atkinson said the company had decided not to spin off its gold exploration activities in NZ into a separate company as a suitable person to manage this had not been found.

When Heritage announced the creation of Mid Earth Minerals Ltd to take up the Coromandel Peninsula properties there was some concern expressed by shareholders that the heart of the company was being taken. What didn’t help that situation was the brief tenure of Paul Cranney in taking up the role of managing director of that company.

Heritage’s progress as an explorer was slowed in the 1980s and 1990s by the hard core anti mining fraternity living in the northern Coromandel and by the soft politics generated, and the loss of properties in that region when the NZ Parliament legislated to halt exploration on any Department of Conservation (DOC) lands in the region – everything but the local farmlands.

In recent years Heritage has worked to re-open the famous Karangahake mine where more than one million ounces of gold and several million oz of silver were recovered around the 1900s. Heritage has recovered one of the main working adits of the Maria Lode on the Talisman mine where it has blocked out unmined zones.

The company also has the promising Rahu project, which is a virginal structure along strike to Karangahake, both near Waihi where Newmont Mining Corporation operates the North Island’s only major hard rock operation with the phasing out Martha open cut and the new Favona underground mine.

Atkinson had moved to NZ to run Heritage just after helping set up the mining lobby, the Association of Mining & Exploration Companies (AMEC) in Perth for junior Australian explorers and miners. He helped sharpen up the NZ Minerals Industry Association in the NZ capital of Wellington and has been president of that organisation for several years.

Last year Heritage supported a new company called Northland Minerals to take up grass roots gold targets in the Northland region, in the northern sector of the North Island.

source:www.mineweb.net