Ventana Gold agrees to Eike Batista’s sweetened takeover offer

Ventana Gold Corporation yesterday agreed to a sweetened bid from AUX Canada Acquisition (AUX), a unit of Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista's EBX Group to buy the shares it does not already own in a deal that values the Canadian junior gold miner at around C$1.5 billion ($1.47 billion).

Rio de Janeiro-based AUX, which holds about 20-per cent stake in Ventana, had in November made an unsolicited takeover bid to buy the remaining 80 per cent of Ventana for C$12.63 each. (See: Brazil's EBX launches $1.47-bn bid for Canada's Ventana Gold)

After resisting the C$12.63 per share offer for three months, Vancouver, British Colombia-based Ventana yesterday agreed to AUX's sweetened offer of C$13.06-a-share, valuing the company at around C$1.5 billion.

The sweetened offer represents a premium of 30.2 per cent to the closing price of Ventana's common shares on 16 November.

Ventana is a mineral exploration and development company with mineral rights to 4,590 hectares of exploration property in north-eastern Colombia.

The company's flagship project is the 4,590 hectares of exploration La Bodega property in the California-Vetas mining district, 400km northeast of Bogota, Colombia.

The La Bodega project contains multiple high-grade zones of gold, silver and copper minerals and the company estimates that annual production from the property to be around 347,000 gold equivalent ounces.