Pounce On Panther at Master Investor Show 2023

Darren Hazelwood’s ‘Poacher turned Gamekeeper’ presentation at this year’s Master Investor Show is bound to be an honest one.

Hazelwood is the chief executive of main board listed explorer Panther Metals. Before the business IPO’d in 2020 his corporate life had been through several iterations including being a TR1 holder of six companies and prolific retail investor.

Go further back into his career and he’s also been prolific in terms of entrepreneurism in a career which has experienced wins and wash outs. He doesn’t like to be reminded of the time he was seventeen and a junior member of a road gang that hit a pipe and flooded three houses.

That wasn’t a good day. Hazelwood had superb days however as founder, owner and shelf filler at the imaginatively named Hazelwoods builder’s merchants in Hitchin. It was there he said he saw what was in constant demand, what’s really required to build and develop and the tools most frequently used.

“I spoke to the traders about why they were buying,” says Hazelwood “what they did, the materials they trusted and what they invested in outside of business and despite generalisations they didn’t just invest in the local pub.”

Conversations about pea shingle in one tonne aggregate bags were plentiful as were the musings about the companies that Hazelwood thought were powering or had the potential to power economies or at least contribute to the infrastructure needed.

So he put his money where his musings were and invested in the mining sector and those exploring for and producing the raw materials that he knew from his shop floor experience were required for economic expansion.

He attended the investor shows, researched, had success with his portfolio overall and took up the position of chief executive of Panther Metals plc with its assets in Canada and Australia.

Within three years he and a team of industry veterans including Ariana Resources Kerim Sener explored, sold non-core assets while retaining beneficial interests, spun out the antipodean portfolio and are concentrating on teasing out and proving up the massive VMS district scale discovery the team believes they have in Canada.

Non-geologists are irritated by industry acronyms, but geologists and those familiar with mining salivate over Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide ore deposits because they typically yield copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver.

And all those years of listening and talking to traders – welders and investors alike, his shop floor everyman demeanour hasn’t left Hazelwood and it comes in useful.

The rapport he has with the first nations is remarkable and last year’s invitation to a community pow wow was Hazelwood and Panther receiving a blessing that will expedite and facilitate operations in Ontario.

He’s established good relationships with geologists and executives who work on neighbouring properties. They share data and Panther can piggyback on other’s paid for intelligence and when a neighbour gets bought or multi-million dollar investment from Tier One mining companies, he knows that Panther’s assets are valuable.

Many assets are drill-ready and the necessary liquidity events have been put in place. There’s the 36.6% ownership of Panther Metals (Australia) Ltd, there’s the net smelter royalty negotiated for the former Big Bear project and there’s the as yet untapped Canadian markets and their incentives of flow-through tax schemes.

Hazelwood, as the Master Investor audience will no doubt learn from his semi-autobiographical presentation, has had his wash out. There are no plans for another.

Darren is appearing at the Master Investor show on Saturday April 15^th at 11:05 – 11:20 on the Showcase Stage and will be at the event all day.