High River Gold Comments on Share Price Decline
High River Gold Mines Ltd. would like to comment on the large share transaction volume and consequent share price decline resulting from trading late on Friday September 19, 2008. The Company believes that the share price decline was related to High River’s deletion from several S&P/TSX indices, and the resulting selling by index funds.
On September 12, 2008, Standard & Poor’s Canadian Index Operations issued a press release announcing its quarterly index changes. In this press release it was announced that High River, among others, was to be deleted from the S&P/TSX Composite, Global Gold, Global Mining, and SmallCap Indices, effective as of market open on September 22, 2008. To adjust for these index changes, index funds likely sold all of their remaining High River shareholdings late last Friday. Several brokerage analysts specializing in stock index trading estimated that these funds were required to sell approximately 15 million High River shares to re-align their holdings with the announced changes. Over 9 million High River shares, or nearly 4 times the average daily trading volume, traded during the last hour of trading on Friday, causing the share price to drop by more than 40%.
The Company is not aware of any other corporate developments to explain this share price decline on September 19, 2008.
High River believes that its current share price significantly undervalues the Company, and is currently examining various initiatives to remedy this situation.
High River is an unhedged gold company with producing mines, mines under development, and advanced exploration projects in Burkina Faso and Russia. High River is bringing two new open-pit gold mines into production. The Taparko-Bouroum Gold Mine in Burkina Faso achieved commercial production in October 2007, and the Berezitovy Gold Mine in Russia is expected to achieve commercial production shortly. At full production, annual gold production is planned at 100,000 ounces at Taparko-Bouroum and is expected to exceed 100,000 ounces at Berezitovy. Combined with gold production from two underground mines in Russia, Zun-Holba and Irokinda, High River’s attributable unhedged annual gold production is expected to exceed 300,000 ounces. In addition, the Company has three advanced exploration projects, the Bissa Gold Project in Burkina Faso, the world-class Prognoz Silver Project and the Chaya Nickel Project in Russia. These projects are expected to significantly add to the Company’s shareholder value in the future.
