Omai to employ hundreds of Guyanese as company gears up for production

With Omai Gold Mines undertaking exploration activities after its multi-million-dollar deal with Silvercorp earlier this year, the company has indicated that close to 1000 workers, most of them Guyanese, are likely to be employed after it starts production.

This was revealed to this publication during an interview with Omai’s Vice President of Exploration, Dr Dennis La Point. La Point explained that at present they are doing exploration activities with a limited technical team.
La Point declined to say when production is likely to start, but noted that when they do transition to production, there will be an explosion in employment figures.
Omai have meanwhile already contracted a local company to do their drilling – a company that is on standby for when drilling starts.
“We’re building up our staff. We’re going to build up a good team… Right now we have a small team, we don’t need a lot of people. We have a drilling contractor and we have the equipment; we have security people, we have cooks, we have technicians to help us out, and geologists,” he explained.
According to La Point, they intend to employ as close to a 100 per cent Guyanese work force as possible. Asked how many persons would eventually be employed, La Point noted that they are likely to employ as many as 1000 workers.
He also detailed the other benefits from Omai’s presence in Guyana. “(Employment numbers) depend on the size of the operation…we could easily be talking about maybe close to a thousand people. The benefits are: the employment, and we would recruit people from the region; the taxes that we and our people would pay, and the royalties we would pay to the Government,” La Point explained. “So, Guyana would come out very well. And the thing with the mining operation (is that) it does take a lot of people. So, it’s not the type of operation that we would have just a handful of people running the mine.
“Another thing is, we would want to build up the infrastructure,” La Point also said.
Omai’s ability to employ hundreds of Guyanese will come as welcome news to alleviating Guyana’s unemployment woes. It also comes at a time when other mining companies like Aurora Gold Mines have changed management, resulting in hundreds of Guyanese workers losing their jobs.
Historically, Omai Gold Mines was the first large-scale gold mine in the Guianas. The mine employed hundreds of Guyanese and provided taxes and economic gain to Guyana. During the 1990s, Cambior, a now defunct Canadian company, was able to operate even with the low gold price and financial troubles.
Silvercorp, a Canada-based company with interest in precious metals, was recently issued 30,000,000 common shares of Avalon Investments Holding, a private Barbadian corporation which has a 100 per cent indirect interest in Omai.
The investment also allowed Anconia Resources Corp and Silvercorp to enter into an investor rights agreement which will give Silvercorp the right to participate in the company’s equity financings.
There has been much upheaval in the local mining sector of recent. And Silvercorp has played an important part in it. Silvercorp had previously entered an agreement with fellow Canadian company Guyana Goldfields, the previous manager of Aurora Gold Mines, for Silvercorp to buy out that company’s shares.
That was until a Chinese company – Zijin Mining Group Co, a leading global mining company specializing in gold, copper, zinc, and other mineral resource exploration and development – bettered their purchasing price and the conditions that were agreed upon.
Silvercorp was given an option to better Zijin’s price within a certain timeframe. However, Silvercorp failed to make a superior offer, resulting in Guyana Goldfields accepting the offer of the Chinese mining company. (G3)