Corina Gold Project

London-listed Hochschild Mining plc., has the option to purchase the Corina Gold Project from Lara by making staged cash payments totalling US$4,150,000 of which US$650,000 has been paid to date, with the next instalment of US$1,000,000 due by July 2021. Hochschild must also pay Lara a 2% net smelter return royalty on any future production (see Company news release of June 23, 2014 for details).

The Corina Gold Project comprises a block of licenses totalling 8,300 hectares in area in the Antabamba region, Apurimac Department, Southern Peru. The geological setting is a belt of Tertiary-age volcanic rocks that also host to Hochschild’s Pallancata and Immaculada mining operations and past producer Selene, with Lara’s main targets located approximately 15km north (approximately 25km by road) of the mill at Selene, which currently serves the Pallancata mine.

Hochschild’s first drill program at Corina in 2019 intercepted a number mineralized structures with high gold and silver values (see Lara news release of October 1, 2019 for details). The Covid-19 pandemic delayed follow-up work, but drilling resumed in later 2020, with a further 2,318 metres completed in the period and reported in Q1-2021 (see Lara news release of February 2, 2021 for details).

The reported intercepts do not necessarily represent true widths. The current program is expected to run until mid-October with a further four drillholes either planned or in progress (program total 14).

Drilling Data, QAQC and Qualified Person

Drilling is being supervised by Ares geologists based at site, who also take the core down to the Ares exploration base in Calhuanca, where it is photographed, logged and the altered sections then sampled. One quarter of core is sent to Ares’ certified internal laboratory at the Selene plant nearby and one-half of the core is sent to ALS Chemex in Lima. The results reported in the table above are all from the independent ALS Chemex laboratory. In addition to running all the samples through these two laboratories, Ares follows the standard QAQC procedures of inserting blank, reference and duplicate samples into its sample lots.

Michael Bennell, Lara’s Vice President Exploration and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM), is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects and has approved the technical disclosure and verified the technical information in this news release.