Cantex says Fipke has not sold shares
Cantex Mine Development Corp. [CD-TSXV; CTXDF-OTC] issued a statement Tuesday January 21 saying that it wanted to clarify recent System For Electronic Disclosure By Insiders (SEDI) filings related to the Yukon silver-lead-zinc explorer.
Cantex said it has been advised that, contrary to recent SEDI filings, neither Chairman Dr. Charles Fipke, nor any entity associated with him has sold any shares of Cantex.
“The recently reported dispositions were all Christmas gifts of shares to family members and employees of CF Minerals, and the SEDI filings have been amended accordingly,” the company said in a press release. Headed by Fipke, CF Mineals is a Kelowna, B.C.,based specialist in heavy mineral geochemistry.
Cantex is a company that set out to define a world class silver-lead-zinc deposit on its 100%-owned North Rackla claim block, which is located approximately 100 km northeast of Mayo in central Yukon.
It has launched the search roughly 30 years after Fipke discovered Canada’s first commercial diamond mine (Ekati) in the Northwest Territories
Covering 14,077-hectares, the Yukon project is also situated to the northeast of both Atac Resources Ltd.’s [ATC-TSXV] Rackla gold property and Victoria Gold Corp.‘s [VIT-TSXV] new Eagle Mine.
Hopes that Fipke is onto another big find sparked a steady rise in the value of Cantex shares from 18 cents in October, 2018 to a recent high of just under $7.00 in August, 2019. But the stock price has plunged to below 60 cents this week.
On Tuesday, the shares were down 1.5% or $0.01 to 65 cents and now trade in a 52-week range of 56 cents and $6.99.
Last year, the company was hoping to take a significant step towards its goal by drill testing almost 1 km of strike length on the massive sulphide zone to a depth in places of up to 550 metres. Should we intersect mineralization similar to that intersected last year, this will be a significant deposit, the company has said.
However, in a January 6, 2020, update, the company said it had completed 139 holes totalling 38,174 metres of core drilling at Rackla North, substantially more than the 18,000 metres proposed at the start of 2019.
The 2019 drill program is now complete and drilling is expected to resume when field conditions allow in late spring (2020), the company said in the update.
“With the onset of winter, avalanche hazard limited the area in which it was safe to work,” the company said. “Drills which were testing the continuity to depth beneath pad MZ 5 of the Extension Target and the strike extent of the mineralization at the Discovery Target were relocated to the flat till covered area between these two targets,” the company said.
Cantex went on to say that the till in this area is up to 50 metres thick, making targeting difficult as prospecting and soil-talus sampling were ineffective. “In addition, ground geophysical surveys (including gravity, electromagnetics, induced polarization and resistivity) were unable to define known massive sulphide mineralization, preventing their application.”
In spite of these challenges, Cantex said it successfully intersected significant sulphide mineralization.
The company said poor weather conditions towards the end of the year hampered air support to the project, delaying the shipment of core samples from the site. However, it said conditions did improve just prior to Christmas, allowing the samples to be sent out.
Cantex said the samples have arrived at CF Mineral Research, where they are being crushed and pulverized prior to be sent to ALS Global in North Vancouver for assaying.