interesting

Came accross this recent article, there may be more to HAO than first meets the eye, worth researching I think.

Morgan unveils touch of gold for Haoma
By Christopher Webb
February 11, 2004

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John Elliott, Michele Levine, John McInnes and Gary Morgan. All but Elliott are in the money at Haoma Mining.
Picture: Michael Clayton-Jones

Gary Cordell Morgan had some terrific news for the 15 intrepid souls who turned up for a procedural Haoma Mining NL shareholders' meeting yesterday morning.

The bullish tidings concerned drilling results on the company's Bulletin gold prospect at Bamboo Creek in the Pilbara.

Morgan unveiled some high-grade gold hits, including 16 metres of dirt grading 5.4 grams of gold a tonne and two metres grading 22 grams of gold.

The "significant gold discovery" was enough to propel Haoma's share price from 15¢ to as high as 40¢. It closed at 34¢.

Turnover was 35 million shares out of nearly 183 million shares, but Morgan controls 63 per cent of the register and WMC owns about 10 million shares.

There are only about 40 million loose shares, not much more than yesterday's turnover.

"None of the big shareholders sold out," Morgan said yesterday, noting that the turnover must have been due to day traders.

"I don't know how it works out there," he observed.

Meanwhile, yesterday was the second time in eight weeks that Haoma scrip had doubled, much to the delight of Gary Morgan, not to board member Michele Levine and consultant, the former WMC chief, Hugh "Huge" Morgan.

Levine and "Huge" recently got 2 million freebie Haoma options exercisable at 10¢ apiece, which meant at the height of proceedings yesterday they were each $600,000 ahead on paper.

Better not to mention the 500,000 shares that Haoma board member John McInnes flogged first thing in the New Year at 16¢ or thereabouts.

As Morgan observed yesterday: "He sold some, he'd be unhappy wouldn't he? He told me he was going to sell them and he said this will guarantee the shares will go up."

At least John Mcinnes held on to 1.5 million shares.

Fellow Haoma director John Elliott's stake was a mere 16,080 shares at last report.

Meanwhile, Gary Morgan was anything but unhappy yesterday.

"Well, my reports have always been good," he said. "No one understands them or reads them or studies them or takes any notice and all of a sudden they took off.

"It's good isn't it?" he remarked of the Bamboo Creek drilling results.

So what does it all mean?

"Well, they're some pretty good intersections we've got there, that's what it means," Gary said.

"I guess we've always known that there were high-grade zones at the Bamboo Creek goldfield but this one kind of comes together better than the others have."

How much gold does he think there is at the prospect?

"We don't know. It's there, (though). It was mined after the war, it was always known there was three-ounce dirt there but it was underground and expensive . . . small tonnages.

"When you drill it, you're finding two, three, four gram dirt on either sides of the high-grade zones.

"So you could be able to open cut (mine) this and the mineralisation is 60 metres wide.

"We're extending some of those holes because they were in mineralisation and the deeper ones we put down were pretty good.

"We've got another hole that I'll get the result of today or tomorrow or in the next few days.

"You can see the lode, which is quite good. When you can see a lode it is much better and we'll probably go and do a few holes 100-odd metres from it to see if there are high-grade intersections there . . .

"No one has ever drilled this area to the west. BHP drilled in a different position and we'd drilled in a different position over the years.

"We had looked for it up there and we never drilled in this position . . . I mean there is just so much land.

"We knew there were high-grade veins there but we didn't know the extent of the mineralisation across the whole ore envelope.

"We put a few shallow holes down and so we thought we'd put a few deep ones down.

"Well, we've hit it. It's gone much better at depth. That's why it's encouraging. It's what you need isn't it?

"I'm certain it's a mine. We're starting to mine in the next few weeks. You've got to start mining straight away."

He added: "There's no doubt the mineralisation runs along the whole area there for five or six kilometres.

So has Gary Morgan brought home the bacon for Haoma's loyal band of shareholders, some of whom have stuck with him for many years.

"I think I brought home the bacon before at Nolans (in Queensland) but the bacon disappeared, didn't it?," he said. "They took it from me.

"If you look at Nolans, we got over a million ounces out of Nolans, but unfortunately I had a dispute with MIM, although they gave us the $20 million, which in hindsight probably looks pretty good.

"I think we did well at Nolans but this (Bamboo Creek) will be good, though. This is quite good.

"This will be a good cash flow. There's nothing like high-grade gold mines, is there?

"If you look at all the mines that made a lot of money in Australia, they've been high grade.

When you get into the earthmoving business it gets a bit difficult.

"We'll see how the next holes go."