New board at Ovoca approved

The appointment of a new board of directors for the mineral exploration company Ovoca Resources plc was approved by shareholders yesterday amid queries at the annual meeting about the company's future direction.

Mr Frank Buckley, a mining consultant, who is the managing director of the newly constituted seven-member board, was also on the former board along with Mr Pat O'Mahony and Mr Jim Stanley. Mr Stanley has resigned for health reasons.

The decision to restructure the board comes ahead of the company's annual general meeting next month and a week after the company announced that a proposed joint venture with a Canadian group, Paramount Ventures, would not go ahead, with the loss of £1.9 million of potential investment. However the company will be drawing up alternative plans for raising investment funds to exploit its zinc deposit mine at Keel, Co Longford. The new chairman, Mr Paul Smithwick, said that considering the potential zinc deposits at Keel, it was felt to be in shareholders' interests not to pursue the joint venture which would have reduced Ovoca's control of a successful operation to 25 per cent.

Shareholders asked yesterday for details of how the company proposed to raise funding, what drilling operations it would be engaged in and what kind of strategy it would be adopting. Mr Buckley said that details would be prepared for the annual meeting. Good field techniques had been evolved and there were a number of "target" sites, which ranged from being very good to reasonable. Some of these were on the periphery of the company's mine property at Keel.

In a letter to shareholders, the company said the Keel deposit had been assessed to have a value of almost $9 million (£6 million), at a zinc price of $1.30 per tonne. The new board "intends to examine a number of proposals to procure the funding either through joint ventures or from both new and existing Ovoca shareholders to develop its interest".

Mr Smithwick, a solicitor, is a non-executive director of UCB Pharma, Kilkenny Brewing Company Ltd and European Forest Products Ltd. He is joined on the board by Mr Buckley, Mr John O'Connor, an accountant; Mr Andrew McMeekan, a former managing director at Guinness Brewing and chairman of Guinness Group Sales; Mr Desmond Alexander, an engineer, and Mr Harry Dobson, a mining investor, who was a non-executive director of Conroy Petroleum plc. Mr McMeekan said mining did not have a good image in Ireland as a stock market investment and a lot of people had been "burnt". He said the Ovoca share price had to be properly marketed and the company had to communicate what it was doing with well-laid plans. Mr O'Connor added after the meeting that the decision to pull out of Russia was made because the company felt it was best to concentrate resources in Ireland which had one of the best zinc mining prospects in Europe. Russia was also "a difficult place to do business", he said.