The Gallowai Bul Mine 40 km southeast of Cranbrook will live to mine another day after a decisive victory in B.C. Supreme Court against a group of dissident shareholders that were trying to oust its 81-year-old chairman.

“Now we can move forward,” said Mine Manager Graham Seal-Jones in response to the decision released Feb. 2 by BC Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask.

Leask dismissed the bid by a dozen unhappy shareholders, mainly from Alberta, that launched a shareholder “oppression” suit against Ross Stanfield, chairman of Gallowai Bul Mining Corporation and Bul River Mineral Corp., both privately held companies.

The shareholders argued they were being kept in the dark about what was happening at the underground deposit of gold copper and silver at the base of Bull Mountain and that the mine never went into production despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it by disgruntled investors.

But Leask ruled in his judgment that the investors knew going in that their investment was “speculative” and Stanfield had not engaged in any “oppressive conduct.” However, Leask said it was not unreasonable for the dissident shareholders to receive more information from the company and that the board of directors should be reconstituted.

Seal Jones said the litigation, which has gone on for several months, slowed things down at the mine site and only a dozen employees are working there now where there had been close to 100. But this should change in the near future, he said.

“There’s going to be information going out very, very quickly, probably in the next few days., telling everybody what happened and how we’re going to move forward. We’re going to put a business plan together. Obviously we’d like to say we’re going to go into production (now) but we can’t do that so we’re going to say these are the steps we’ll be taking to put us closer to production.”

Even though Gallowai won the court case and the dissident shareholders were ordered to pay costs, the company realizes it’s going to have to be more willing to share information than it has been in the past, said Seal Jones.

“We are a private company, but I think he (Stanfield) realizes now that it’s probably in our best interests as a viable company to do that.” (share information). “You always have that eagle eye of people watching you saying this is a scam or this it a con. But the judge said absolutely not. It isn’t. You don’t build miles of drifts (tunnels) underground without spending a lot of money.

“We do have a grade. We do have an ore body. What we’re working towards is improving our grade and developing our resources. What we’re trying to do is get a gradable ore that we can actually produce. That’s mining. That’s what we do.”

The court case put the mine’s development into a holding pattern for several months, but now that’s going to change, said Seal Jones. “We’re going to move ahead. We’ll probably start getting some more funds from investors and move forward with a positive attitude.”

He said he hopes the shareholders that petitioned the company into court will let bygones be bygones. “I’m not going to say you lost and we won. I’m going to say, hey, we didn’t get anywhere out of this, let’s move forward and stop haggling about trivial things.”

A processing mill on the site remains closed, and in the near term at least, most of the work at the site will be drilling further underground to try to find a better grade of ore, said Seal Jones.

“We’ve produced a grade that we could report. We don’t need to do that anymore. What we need to do now is do more exploring at depth and we’ll be ramping up as soon as we can get our business plan together.”

More jobs may become available at that time and the mine likes to hire locally, he said. Seal Jones denied the mine is anti-union and said the reason dozens of men were laid off over a year ago was that a pilot project at the processing mill had come to an end.”

“Under the rules, the union is allowed to try to organize outside the gate and we can’t stop them from discussing the union at lunch time. We live in a democratic society.”

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