G Mining wins court approval to advance Gurupi project in Brazil

G Mining Ventures (TSX: GMIN) has scored a legal victory in Brazil that grants it permission to advance the Gurupi gold project.

On Wednesday, the Canadian gold miner announced that a federal agrarian court in Maranhão, northeastern Brazil, has ruled in its favour with respect to the project’s environmental licensing process. Specifically, the court annulled the legacy licences issued to a prior operator in 2011 and confirmed G Mining’s ability to initiate a new licensing process.

The ruling, which resolves a longstanding civil action that has been open since 2013, provides “a clean regulatory path forward and positions Gurupi for long-term development and strategic growth,” G Mining stated in a press release.

The environmental process would require the submission of a full environmental impact assessment and report (EIA/RIMA) and prior consent from the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) for areas overlapping agrarian settlements, it noted.

Louis-Pierre Gignac, CEO of G Mining, calls the court ruling “a pivotal moment” for the Gurupi project by removing a longstanding regulatory constraint in its permitting process, while highlighting the company’s track record in “navigating complex regulatory environments.”

Shares of G Mining Ventures rose 2% by midday Wednesday on the announcement, giving the company a market capitalization of just over C$4 billion.

District-scale gold project

Gurupi represents the third asset in the company’s project pipeline after the Tocantinzinho mine, also in Brazil, and the Oko West project in Guyana, which is nearing a construction decision.

“With this legal certainty, we are now well positioned to unlock the full potential of this district-scale asset through focused exploration and meaningful stakeholder engagement,” Gignac stated in Wednesday’s release.

G Mining considers the Gurupi project to be a long-term development asset with significant mineral resource expansion opportunities. The property covers an approximate 1,900 km² land package, containing three deposits with a combined gold resource of 1.83 million indicated ounces and 770,000 inferred ounces.

The project has a long history of exploration that first began in the 1980s, when Vale and other operators identified multiple gold occurrences along an 80-km mineralized trend. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, over 126,000 metres of drilling had been completed to define the key deposits.

Luna Gold acquired the project in 2007, expanding drilling efforts and establishing a JORC-compliant resource. Australia’s OZ Minerals took over the project in 2016 and conducted further exploration. A pre-feasibility study was completed in 2019, contemplating a high-margin open-pit gold operation.

G Mining acquired Gurupi in Q4 2024 from BHP, which took over OZ Minerals in 2023, and released the NI 43-101 resource estimate. An initial exploration budgeted of $2-4 million has been designated for the project this year. However, a larger budget would be allocated upon receipt of the necessary exploration permits in the second half of 2025, the company said.