London-listed Kavango Resources has issued a $5-million convertible loan note facility to a consortium of Zimbabwe-registered pension funds.

The company notes that the facility is interest free and can be drawn down in three tranches by Kavango.

"We are delighted to have secured this $5-million investment facility from the Comarton Managed Pension Funds Investments Consortium. A key driver of our strategy in Zimbabwe is to promote local shareholder ownership.

“The country's gold fields are incredibly rich and it is important that citizens are offered the opportunity to participate in their future success, through long-term equity investment,” says Kavango CE Ben Turney.

He adds that this sends a “strong message that Zimbabwe is open for business”.

“We look forward to this investment acting as a cornerstone for our introduction to the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange a little later this summer.”

Turney describes the consortium as an influential group of individual pension funds in Zimbabwe that collaborates on investments.

He notes that 28 consortium members have the mandate to invest in equities and have indicated their intention to participate in the Kavango investment facility.

As part of a rigorous due diligence, several consortium members and members of the investment committee conducted site visits to review Kavango's gold projects – Hillside and Nara, which are located on the same greenstone belt.

“It reflects the strong progress our team has made, in less than two years of operations in Zimbabwe, that we successfully passed this process,” Turney comments.

Turney says the company intends to use the Comarton funds for mine development and construction of its first gold processing plant.

Kavango currently aims to bring Prospects 1, 3 and 4 at the Hillside project into production over the next 12 months, using modern mechanised mining.

“The consortium's backing of Kavango is a powerful endorsement of the company's business model and we look forward to building on this relationship in the coming years,” says Turney.

"The consortium is excited at having secured a partner to walk with in their fourth investment quadrant: the mining sector, having already successfully executed on the: targeted property sector, tourism and agriculture sectors,” adds Comarton Consultants group MD Richard Muirimi.

He says the partnership with Kavango answers to the key consortium investment focus of bedding the actual asset in hard currency, benefiting from potential capital growth, the generation of long-term hard currency free cash flows and contributing to the development of sustainable businesses that create employment and other benefits for Zimbabwean citizens.

With a firm focus on ensuring all the four quadrants generate hard currency cash flows, Muirimi says this partnership will contribute to the enhancement of the payment of hard currency quarterly dollar pensions on the Comarton portfolio being implemented from January 1.