Consil Chief Ralph No To Step Down

Almost two years after he left Hecla Mining Co. to revive dormant Consil Corp., President and Board Chairman Ralph Noyes will leave the junior mining company.

Noyes said Wednesday he will resign from his post Sept. 30, acknowledging the unsuccessful six-month attempt to acquire a Mexican company.

For the past year, Consil, of Hayden, Idaho, has studied purchasing the assets of Mexican mining company Minas la Colorada, which would have given the young company its biggest holding.

Last week Minas la Colorada agreed to sell its assets and Mexican silver mine to Canadian company Pan American Silver Corp. for $2.1 million and 304,000 shares of Pan American.

“I was tired of working on this,” said Noyes, who is now considering working as a consultant to mining firms interested in acquiring Mexican assets. “To come up with another asset of that nature would take another year.”

Consil’s board of directors will meet early next month to discuss Noyes’ replacement and new direction for the company.

“I’ll resign and let Hecla decide what they want done with it,” Noyes said.

Hecla Mining Co. is a major shareholder of Consil stock, and does not plan on financing Consil’s projects, said Vicki Veltkamp, Hecla manager of corporate communications.

“The junior market doesn’t look promising, so we’re not prepared to finance further exploration,” she said. “We wanted it to be successful, because we were major shareholders.”

Consil, like other junior mining companies, had difficulty finding investor support after the Bre-X scandal sent chills through the mining community this spring.

As Consil put its financing package together in March, Calgary-based Bre-X began to collapse on the stock market, falling from $200 to $6 a share. Bre-X finally ended in bankruptcy in May.

In early August, Consil put the purchase on hold after it had difficulty raising $6 million to finance the purchase of Minas la Colorada assets. Then Minas la Colorada called off talks with Consil because of low metal prices and the possibility that Consil might be named in the federal lawsuit for cleanup of the Coeur d’Alene Basin. Consil was not named in the suit. Mining scandals and the “fall in price of gold and silver made the investment community sit back,” Noyes said.

, DataTimes