eqh in the australian

Confirms what I have been posting and seems quite interesting & timely.

From today's Barry Fitzgerald column in The Australian:

Chinese backing juniors
JUNIOR explorers need all the help they can get at present because the taps for easy equity funding have been turned off.

Most will survive the squeeze as it's all happened before, and it will happen again. But there is a difference this time around: the number of Chinese prepared to fill the funding void.

They are making things just that little bit easier for those prepared to embrace them. They are resource savvy and have the proverbial deep pockets. It's pretty open stuff too because an underlying theme to it all is that the Chinese investors are more than happy to let locals run the show. And they don't necessarily have to have an absolute control position.

Colin Ikin is finding the same thing at this recent $2.5m float of African iron ore explorer, Equamineral (ASX:EQH). Its shares -- make that its CHESS depositary interests (CDIs) -- have been trading at the issue price of 20c, giving the company an all up, nice and tight, market capitalisation of $4.8m.

Exploration at its iron ore project in the stable Congo, the Republic of Congo, will be worth watching if for nothing else than the company's tight capital base. But the real interest today is the 18 per cent or so of the company held by Chinese interests. Ikin got the same message that Moriarty did on funding. It could get really interesting because Equamineral is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. So things such as substantial shareholding notices and takeover thresholds don't apply. If the Chinese want to march to 50 per cent, so be it, at a price of course.