Great Panther Mining
Great Panther Mining Limited (formerly Great Panther Silver) is a Canadian company, headquartered in Vancouver, that owns and operates a gold mine in Brazil. The company became a metal producer and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2006 after a restructuring in which Robert Archer took over as Chief Executive Officer and acquired and returned several dormant silver-gold mines in Mexico back into production. In 2015 the company merged with TSXV-listed Cangold which was attempting to develop its own gold-silver mine in Mexico. In early 2019, the company acquired ASX-listed Beadell Resources for its Tucano Gold Mine in Brazil. In 2020, the Company announced its inaugural Mineral Resource & Mineral Reserve for the Tucano gold mine in which a 51% reduction of mineral resources was reported. In 2022 the company went bankrupt despite selling its Mexican mines. History The company that would become Great Panther Mining was founded in 1965 as a private company called Lodestar Mines Ltd, prospecting emeralds in Zimbabwe. It became a public company, as Lodestar Energy Inc, with its initial public offering on June 18, 1980, on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. It underwent several name changes, mergers and acquisitions and pursued several business interests throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including oil and gas development in Oklahoma, agriculture as Controlled Environmental Farming International Ltd, baby bassinets as New Age Ventures and oil again, this time in California and Thailand, as Great Panther Inc. The company re-organized again in 2003-04 to become Great Panther Resources Limited, with a new CEO, Robert Archer, to pursue the development of various mineral rights in Mexico. Among other interests, it acquired the Guanajuato Mine Complex and the Mexican mining company Minera Mexicana el Rosario SA de CV for its dormant Topia Mine. They brought those former mines back into production so that in 2006 they produced 730 tonnes of zinc, 616 tonnes lead, 313,484 oz of silver and 1,394 oz of gold. With this production, in November 2006, the company's stock graduated to the Toronto Stock Exchange from the TSX Venture Exchange. In 2010, when the company changed its name to Great Panther Silver they produced 1,534,957 oz of silver along with over a thousand tonnes of both zinc and lead and, subsequently, in 2011, their stock became cross-listed on the NYSE Amex Equities Exchange. While the Topia and Guanajuato mines would remain their only operating mines until 2019, they pursued other mineral interests, such as the El Horcon silver-gold project in Jalisco, Mexico and the Coricancha gold-silver project in Peru. In 2015, Great Panther Silver purchased TSXV-listed Cangold for its the Guadalupe de los Reyes gold-silver project in Sinaloa, Mexico, in an all-share deal worth $1.7 million. The company has been challenged with several deaths at its mine sites. In 2014 a trespasser was killed by guards, in 2016 a worker was killed while operating an underground loader, both at the Guanajuato complex, and in 2019 two more workers were killed in work place accidents. The company added a third