OREANDA-NEWS. ITOCHU Corporation announced that it recently executed a basic agreement with Kaizen Discovery Inc., a Canadian company, regarding acquisition of two copper and gold mine projects which Kaizen's wholly owned subsidiary, West Cirque Resources Ltd., owns in British Columbia, Canada.

The details of the agreement are as follows.
- Aspen Grove copper/gold mine project: ITOCHU will acquire a 40% interest in the project in exchange for a cash payment of four million Canadian dollars (equivalent to about 380 million yen).
- Tanzilla copper/gold mine project: ITOCHU will acquire an initial, 15% interest in the Tanzilla Project for a cash payment of 250,000 Canadian dollars (equivalent to about 24 million yen), subject to the consent of Freeport-McMoRan of Canada Limited, with an option to acquire up to a further 10% interest in the project.

Acquisition of the interest in the two fields above is to be implemented upon execution of the formal agreement which ITOCHU is currently negotiating with Kaizen based on the basic agreement executed recently. Upon acquisition of the rights above, ITOCHU will proceed with the exploration/development business together with Kaizen.

Both the Aspen Grove mining project and the Tanzilla mining project are expected to be full of potential for exploration. ITOCHU anticipates that exploration will detect and identify large-scale copper deposits.

The basic agreement described above was executed under the comprehensive partnership agreement signed with Kaizen regarding the business of exploration/development of metal resources in January 2014 (under that agreement ITOCHU acquired 5.7% of the shares of Kaizen). ITOCHU will further aim to increase the rights to nonferrous metals by making use of the comprehensive partnership with Kaizen among other initiatives.