The Century Deposit was discovered by CRA (became Rio Tinto) in...

The Century Deposit was discovered by CRA (became Rio Tinto) in 1990 (the market was told in April). This discovery was more or less 100 years after mining commenced in the Burke mineral field - Hence the name Century. Interestingly - Wayne McCrae - of Cudeco fame - has in the past claimed to have discoverd the Orebody, but the truth is he had nothing to do with it, but he did happen to hold the lease for Silver King at the time. CRA bought the Silver King Lease off him just before releasing details of their 105MT discovery soon after. Wayne promptly sued everyone he could think of, but got no where....

Pasminco was floated to exploit the resource and Mining commenced in 1999 or 2000.

Pasminco went into administration after making some calamitous FX hedging contracts that protected their revenue if the AUD got too strong, but in 2001 (Sept - not long after the World Trade Centre attack) the AUD fell like a stone, and Pasminco could not cover the loss. Interesting read here: https://www.ausimm.com.au/content/docs/speech270403.pdf

The assets of Pasminco were re-floated in 2004 to become Zinifex. This coincided with the last Zinc price boom where we saw a low AUD and a fantastic run up in the Zn Price. In the Financial year of 2006, ZFX booked a net profit of more than 1 billion dollars.

2 years later - the smartest guys in the room decided to merge with Oxiana to form OZ Minerals. There was about 400-450m in debt that was needed to be rolled over, but at the height of the GFC and some uncertainty about commodity prices, as well as the liquidity crunch that was on world markets, a few banks in the syndicate decided to call in the loan and refused to refinance. OZL then went on the auction block where the Chinese company that later became MMG lobbed a bid for the whole thing. This was knocked back by the Aussie Govt at the time due to the Prominent Hill Copper Project being too close to the Military base at Woomera, SA.

MMG were ultimately successful in their purchase, as they left Prom Hill on the table and took all the other assets. OZL were left with Prom Hill and a heap of cash.

MMG ran the Century Mine from 2009-2016 as an operation, and then 2017 in care and maintenance.