Colossus Minerals (COLUF / CSI.TO) wants to mine gold and PGMs in Para, Brazil. The best things that have come out of Brazil IMHO are Pele, churrascaria cooking, and string bikinis. Maybe this mining company can throw something else into that mix.
The management team has a CEO from a finance background. Being the treasurer at a miner is not the same thing as running a mine. Having a mining engineer as COO almost makes up for that but not quite, since his experience is mainly in running mature projects rather than greenfield development. BTW, that COO is Chairman of Tembo Gold, another junior I blogged about today. They at least have a couple of other team members who've worked in Brazil.
Their Serra Palada property has an exploration history. Their preliminary drilling shows unbelievably high ore grades, which begs the question of why the historical open pit that operated there was ever closed (I'll let that go unanswered since I don't know the backstory). Aerial photos of the site show an internal road network and accessible water (those are good things BTW).
Their quarterly financial statements for September 30, 2012 show over C$101M in cash on hand, a phenomenal amount. They'll need it with a burn rate of about C$4M/month, but they can hang in there for another two years.
Colossus has a lot of confidence in itself based on the infrastructure they've emplaced so far. I await the publication of the initial 43-101 report to see whether the astonishingly high grades they obtained in sample drilling will translate into MII resources.
Full disclosure: No position in Colossus Minerals at this time.
