Vital Metals (ASX:VML) - Canada's first rare earths miner

Vital Metals (ASX:VML) – Canada’s first rare earths miner

Vital Metals Limited (ASX:VML) Interim Non-Executive Chairman Richard Crookes discusses termination of the company's Saskatoon facility, the Tardiff rare earths asset, and next steps for the company.

Richard Crookes: Yeah, so I'm here today really to provide a bit of colour to our recent ASX announcement. I think it provides clarity and a long overdue update for our shareholders, and hopefully they see some positives out of it.

We've been conducting a strategic review of our Saskatoon processing facility, and that commenced in April and concluded in mid-July. The results of that we've published this week and a fairly detailed explanation in the release, but in summary we've demonstrated really that the Saskatoon facility doesn't make economic sense for us to operate, so we've decided to terminate that facility. We've placed the holding company, Vital Metals Canada Limited, into bankruptcy, and we've terminated our offtake agreement with REEtec.

So, as you're aware, the company's been in suspension from trading for a couple of months now. We'd like to think that will conclude in a few weeks, once we conclude a capital raise, which will see us able to fund our activities going forward. We went into suspension following a trading halt in mid-July. We rolled into that as a result of some complex issues that were happening. We weren't able to initiate the insolvency at that time, and we've only just been able to conclude that in the last couple of days.

So, the next steps in our strategy are to really focus all our attention on the Tardiff asset. Tardiff's a fantastic asset in a great jurisdiction, and we really want to create value for shareholders by advancing Tardiff.

So, Tardiff is a very large deposit at our Nechalacho project, and it's in a great jurisdiction in the Northwest Territories. It's very large, high grade, shallow open pittable, with great metallurgical characteristics, so we think there's some superb value there to be captured by progressing that project towards development.

We can expect to see some announcements soon around recruitment of executive management team. We've got a couple of candidates lined up already, and we anticipate making those announcements as soon as we've concluded a capital raise and announced this ongoing strategy for Tardiff in the next coming weeks.

So, the key messages for shareholders are please stay with us. We thank you for your patience. We've got a great asset. The board's been working really hard to, you know, salvage a difficult situation for the company, but we're through that. We've now got immense focus on developing Tardiff. And we think that we can reward shareholders with great newsflow in the next few months and a positive share price appreciation.