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The Luxembourg-based mining company La Mancha Holdings has unveiled its new mining fund, La Mancha Fund SCSp. The fund will be dedicated primarily to gold mining.
Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is the owner of La Mancha Holdings.
Sawiris is the eldest of three billionaire brothers in Egypt’s Sawiris family. He is the chairman of the board of La Mancha Holdings, the family’s privately owned gold business.
According to Sawiris, establishing such funds are a logical step in the family’s business after it vended-in its operational assets into Evolution and Endeavour Mining Corporation in 2015. Endeavour is a Cayman Islands-based multinational mining company that owns and operates gold mines in Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
“Transitioning to a fund structure and welcoming new investors is timely when we are seeing opportunities in a gold mining sector which is fragmented and needs further consolidation,” Sawiris said.
La Mancha Holdings plans to use the fund to acquire significant stakes in junior mineral resource companies with strong managerial and geological potential to implement a three-to-five-year value creation strategy.
The fund’s first closing was completed with the receipt of all La Mancha Holding’s gold mining assets (which include a 19.1-percent stake in Endeavour Mining, a 33.4-percent stake in Golden Star and a 35.1-percent stake in Altus Strategies) and an $100-million investment from a strategic partner now investing alongside the Sawiris family.
As of July 26, the fund had gained investments in excess of $1.4 billion in assets and is assessing a number of new opportunities.
The newly launched mining fund will be advised by La Mancha Capital Advisory LLP. It will be supported by an advisory committee, “which I will chair and that will include a number of well-known personalities in the mining sector, many of whom have a long history of working with and advising La Mancha,” the billionaire said.
