JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Toronto-listed Euro Sun Mining’s South African CEO is reported to have exercised considerable resolve in helping to remove the obstacles in the way of turning one of Europe’s large copper/gold projects to positive account.

The Rovina Valley project in west-central Romania has become one of 47 projects across the EU to receive statutory status under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, an accomplishment that Saheti-schooled, University of South Africa and University of Pretoria chartered accountant Grant Sboros has spearheaded.

“It provides us with a mechanism to rapidly deliver critical raw materials in support of Europe’s strategic objectives,” Sboros explained.

The breakthrough means that Euro Sun can now start bringing much-needed and promised employment and tax revenue to Romania’s Hunedoara region by mining the Rovina deposit, which is said to host close to 5% of the copper Europe aims to source domestically by 2030.

It is estimated that the project will yield 389.1-million pounds of copper and 1.4-million ounces of gold over the initial 17-year opencast mining phase.

Sboros says it was probably former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg who has had the biggest influence on his mining career.

Sboros worked for Glencore as Mopani Copper Mines deputy CFO from 2013 to 2017, following which he did a stint as CFO for Katanga Mining from 2017 to 2019, ahead of taking up the CEO reins at Euro Sun in early 2023.

As reported earlier by Mining Weekly, Euro Sun will be going all out to make its 100%-owned Rovina project as green as can be, as it targets a high-grade copper concentrate with a strong gold credit.

Euro Sun has full compliance at the top of its agenda and respects everything around what it describes as a beautiful, relatively uninhabited, lightly wooded area with steep hills.

The plan is to exploit the porphyry-style asset as an opencast operation over a 30-year to 35-year stretch before probably heading underground.