Tier One Silver: Now Trading and Drills Mobilized with CEO Peter Dembicki & Chairman Ivan Bebek

Tier One Silver is a precious metals exploration company that was spun out from Auryn Resources on October 9, 2020. Tier One Silver now trades under the ticker “TSLV” on the TSXV as of June 9th. The OTC listing for U.S. investors should be live soon as the company is submitting its OTC application on June 9th immediately after shares begin trading on the TSXV.

CEO Peter Dembicki stated: “News flow is going to be rampant in the first couple of months, it’s going to be really exciting. So investors have waited so long for us to be listed, all the shareholders and those that took part in our financing. And so in the meantime, we haven’t just been sitting on our hands, we’ve been working and especially the group down in Peru. Bulldozers are in place, excavators are clearing the paths, drills are going to be ready within 10 days from now to start piercing the ground. So we’re going to come from listing our stock today to commencing drilling within 10 days. We have news flow from trenching, more samples coming out and potentially more zones that we’ve discovered. Not to mention, let’s not forget our game plan with Tier One is we’re a portfolio company and we have results to come back from our other assets as well, which are extremely high quality. So we have a ton coming down the pipeline and investors, they’re going to be well in tune with all the news that we have to come.”

Tier One Silver is focused on creating significant value for shareholders through the exploration and potential discovery of world-class silver, gold and copper deposits in southwest Peru. Tier One Silver’s main focus currently is the 100% owned Curibaya project, which consists of approximately 11,000 hectares and is located approximately 48 km north-northeast of the provincial capital, Tacna, accessible by road. Rock grab sampling at the Curibaya project has returned grades of up to 298,000 g/t silver and 934 g/t gold, with samples spread across a 4 x 5 km alteration system. In this interview CEO Peter Dembicki and Chairman Ivan Bebek provides an update on Tier One Silver’s progress, upcoming developments and overall investment value proposition.

0:00 Introduction
0:40 TSLV now trading on TSXV
2:21 Expectations of TSLV’s trading
4:52 Curibaya’s prospectivity
9:36 Upcoming news flow
11:21 Four to six weeks estimated to get first core hole results
13:09 Peruvian presidential election
15:30 Ivan’s view on increased mining taxes

TRANSCRIPT:

Bill: I’m Bill Powers, this is Mining Stock Education, thank you for tuning in. Well today finally, Tier One Silver is beginning trading on the Toronto Venture Exchange so I thought it a good time to bring back on Ivan Bebek the chair as well as Peter Dembicki the president and CEO. So welcome to the show gentlemen, you can finally say your company is trading. Peter, I want to throw it over to you to start. What more can you tell us, give us the ticker symbol again and when should United States investors expect to have their shares tradable?

Peter: Absolutely. Thanks Bill, good to see you again. So we finally made it, TSLV will be the ticker symbol on the Toronto Venture Exchange. After today we will be applying immediately for our OTC symbol to really open it up to all our US investor base. However, if you do have a brokerage account as an American that can trade TSX venture listed securities then you’re free to buy as you wish.

Bill: Where do you see the share price going?

Peter: Well, obviously we have a lot of dreams and internal bets within the group here, where it’s going to open or where it’s going to close. Nothing has changed the fundamentals of the company, all the focus is on Curibaya. It’s going to be an extreme flurry of activity for the first two months so, where is it going to open? Where is it going to trade? That inevitably is up to the market and we have to let the market make that decision but we have high hopes and we know it’s going to be a really active stock, that’s for sure.

Bill: Ivan you mentioned to me in the past that there’s a lot of buying demand out there. You’ve done hundreds of meetings over these last six plus months. What would you like to say about where you expect the share price to open up?

Ivan: Well, sure. It’s been an amazing ride first and foremost since October when we spun it out officially out of Auryn, it was really a concept, didn’t have a CEO, it was some high-grade on the right belt. It’s come a long way and there’s been incredible advance things technically and we got an amazing CEO here with us. Peter did a remarkable job with probably, I don’t know, two or 300 Zoom meetings with the time it took us to get public, which was an extra few months than we originally forecasted. And so we just used that extra time to get extra ready and not just with our projects and do more work and build our confidence but we did it to really set ourselves up to perform out the gate and why are we so ambitious? Why are we so excited? This truly is the number one exploration shot I think I’ve ever seen on a virgin project that’s never been drilled before.

And from that perspective, I get the same question you just asked Peter, where does it open? What’s it going to trade? Look, all I’m going to say is we funded it at a dollar, 14 million shares roughly were purchased at a dollar a few months ago, right? So that gives you a bit of a base of where it should trade and above because that’s a large commitment of that price. But at the same time, this is something that everybody should own if they like huge discoveries, if they like that risk versus reward, that big return potential, you just got to own this regardless of price at least some of it in your portfolio before we get the first-world results back. So for me it’s open range, I’m actually was along the whole listing process.

I was more concerned about drilling than I was about the listing process because even if we didn’t get listed for another six months and we drilled and hit it, we’d still reward shareholders the way they deserve to be rewarded, it just would have been done via privately. But that was just a modest stepping stone, barely a milestone compared to what we’re going to do with the drill bit here. And so I’ve been anxiously pushing the listing with Peter and however I can help but more anxiously I’ve been following the project with extreme anxiety and in a good way of what we might be up to. And you get this fantasy kind of perspective when you see the grade and you see the targeting and there’s still a lot of layers that haven’t come out on this project which you’ll see in the coming weeks here as we’re going to start drilling it, that are pretty paramount towards the probability of success which we think is quite high.

Bill: Ivan, you did a recent interview with Rick Rule about Tier One Silver and your exploration thesis. Rick Rule has taught me and thousands of other speculators to look at exploration as getting answers to unanswered questions. And it’s important what questions you come up with because you don’t want to waste your time and money. And that knowledge and expertise that goes into developing these questions is crucial. Are there new questions that your team has developed over the last six to eight months as you’ve been unlisted?

Ivan: Well, I would say we know the simple facts, right? We know there’s grade, we know there’s scale, we know the address is right, we know the age of mineralization is right, those are the top four things you worry about from a high level and those are all 10 out 10 check marks for us but we haven’t talked a lot about the multi-phase. If you think about that nucleus or that target below surface that’s pulsing these veins up to the surface, it’s got four or five different times that it pulsed veins that have crossed other veins. And it means that the actual system is pulsing high-grade repeatedly over a longer period of time which gives us a really high level of confidence that there’s a large amount of veins and it’s a very robust system, that’s a big one.

The second thing is, when you look at our chargeability in geophysics, we were going through a call with one of our very, very good shareholders and a consultant who works with us, the other day and we’re going through the drill plan and one of the holes crossed our targeted feeder structure and it went for another three, 400 meters, so we turned to Dave Smithson and said, Dave, why are we drilling way past the feeder structure this gentleman asked us? And Dave said, look, he says, we’ve sampled 40 gram gold, et cetera, on top, on the backside of that feeder structure and we see other structures behind it. And my question was, why doesn’t that show up in the chargeability because there’s low sulfide on the Western half of the actual target? So sulfide is what shows up in chargeability, sulfide can include silver and gold.

But we’re getting that really Bonanza grade, silver and gold without high salt content as well, which begs the mystery and a bit of the fantasy of what are we going to find with a drill bit? How many targets, how many veins, how many structures are going to be mineralized when we drill through them? So I like to think our targeting is only scratching the surface and you’re going to have to give it some time but these are some of the things that have not been asked that are paramount. The last question which nobody’s really asked us formally yet is, how come this opportunity was never found before? And whenever you hear something that sounds too good to be true, this great huge target on this belt, like a perfect case scenario which is what it’s advertising as, why didn’t anyone else find this? And I was asking the same call.

And Dave explained, there’s a thin container, a layer of dirt that covers all these veins that he’s been sampling. They sampled over 1500 veins carrying this ridiculous grade, right? And what he said is, if you’re not closer than a meter to see these veins you can’t see them, they’re covered by this layer of dirt. But once you get closer into a meter, you start to see these veins, you take your rock hammer out, you start hammering away and you get rock that Joel just described as screw bar, pardon me for the acronym, but really messed up rock, which means there’s a lot going on. And in big systems, you want to see that massive distortion, huge heat engine, a lot of different events, twisting the rock, turning it and that’s really really positive for the endowment potential of precious metals.

So from that, I think that the market doesn’t know yet that the reason why this was missed is because a thin blanket of dirt that’s covered it and nobody gave it the close attention. Wild Acres, the junior who had this before us, who had a bit of the high grade, they were exploring on the part that had low sulfides. So they didn’t get to all that high grade, multi kilo, Bonanza grade, to the extent we did so there was a miss by the predecessor that ran out of money in the last fair market. And then thirdly, seeing the multi events that form the system, it’s a pulsing system over time, it gives us the chance to believe that there could be a lot more here, it’s not a single event that created some thin veins that have occurred. So I think all of that is paramount towards what’s not been asked that’s as important as what we’ve told you about.

I also think that trenching, which Peter can tell you that news is going to come out in the next few weeks here, I think trenching has been missing because people want to see economic winds of potential mineralization and this project advertised as no outcrop of significance, just been veins kind of piercing through the surface, but the guys have gotten onto some outcome. And so I think the next week or two, we’re going to have some veins coming out, oh sorry, some trenches coming out, which hopefully give us some of those widths that we’ll want to see and drill holes down below.

Bill: Peter, can you talk to us about news flow as Ivan brought up. And how connected are you with the assay labs and when should investors expect a turnaround of these results?

Peter: News flow is going to be rampant in the first couple of months, it’s going to be really exciting. So investors have waited so long for us to be listed, all the shareholders and those that took part in our financing. And so in the meantime, we haven’t just been sitting on our hands, we’ve been working and especially the group down in Peru. Bulldozers are in place, excavators are clearing the paths, drills are going to be ready within 10 days from now to start piercing the ground. So we’re going to come from listing our stock today to commencing drilling within 10 days. We have news flow from trenching, more samples coming out and potentially more zones that we’ve discovered. Not to mention, let’s not forget our game plan with Tier One is we’re a portfolio company and we have results to come back from our other assets as well, which are extremely high quality. So we have a ton coming down the pipeline and investors they’re going to be well in tune with all the news that we have to come.

Bill: 60 days, would that be a fair estimate for when we could see the first drill core results back?

Peter: Yeah, again, sorry I didn’t touch on how fast the labs are coming back, but actually in Peru, funny enough, it’s the one thing that is very efficient. And so our geologists are saying, two to three week turnaround time. I always like to err on the side of being conservative so two to four weeks for results to come back from those first holes. So that’s extremely fast compared to some of the things that we’re seeing in United States even.

Bill: But just if I could clarify that for investors, does it take a week to drill a hole, then two to four weeks for you to get it back then your team has to look at it before you issue the release? So maybe like five to six weeks, would that be the expectation we should set?

Ivan: Four to six weeks Bill is reasonable including the drilling holes, three to four days, depending how hopefully it takes a lot longer to drill the hole and we’ve hit the big porphyry underneath the precious metals, right? But four to six weeks is good guidance for the holes. The next question that you’d ask generally is, are you going to batch it? Are you going to do one hole at a time? All of this will come out as we start drilling because we have to learn the drilling pace until you drill it. You don’t know how fast, how many meters you’re going to get a day, we have an idea and once we do that, but four to six weeks is very fair guidance.

And then the other thing I’ll say that I want to just pipe in on, and sorry to interrupt you Peter there is, this project is not going to be determined in one drill hole as a miss, it’s going to take at least 20 or 30 drill holes to tell us it’s not there, which is a lot, that’ll take us probably a good six months till the end of the year to figure out. And at the same time, if we drill the glory hole on the first day, our lives could all change significantly, within four to six weeks, it could be a whole different world for us.

For an exploration investor this doesn’t get any better, a virgin project, amazing concept, all the right ingredients there, and a lot of ways to make it work and very few ways to kill this. And then the last point I’ll make is we’ve only explored one third of the property and there’s a lot of prospectivity in other parts of this property. Nobody realizes that because we’ve got into such a big 20 square kilometer bulls-eye of veins emanating from the source, but there’s two thirds more to go look at and we are on that belt to some of the world’s largest porphyry deposits within 30, 40 kilometers away.

Bill: Peter, the Peruvian election as we speak, it’s still up in the air, neck and neck. What concerns have investors been posing to you? And what is your thoughts on the election?

Peter: Yeah, I mean, we’re watching what’s happening in Peru right now. All day, every day we have teams that are very connected to the political scene in Peru so we’re able to get firsthand and not just rely on clickbait from the North American media that always likes to throw their spin on everything. As Ivan will tell you and in his past experience with mining in various countries that have political instability, it’s what makes this game tough but it’s what makes the risk reward really pay off. So in Peru specifically, there were a lot of concerns and rhetoric being flown around about the intentions of Mr. Castillo and what he wants to do, but guess what, the election isn’t over yet, there are still hundreds of thousands of votes to be counted from expatriate, both from outside of Peru that heavily lean to the other candidate, Keiko Fujimori. So there’s going to be accusations being slung back and forth, there’s going to be contested and disputed votes so we really think that there’s going to be at least another week before we have anything really definitive to rely on, in the meantime, we’re watching it closely.

At the end of the day do we feel that Pedro is a massive threat to an explorer in Peru? No, we don’t at all. He came out of the gates pretty hard swinging from the left-hand side, however, he was very clear that he does not intend to have any nationalization of any mines in Peru and most likely they’re just looking for a bigger piece of the pie. And so whether that comes in taxes or royalties, but really affecting the larger producers in the company but thankful for us in a state that we are fully funded with full permits in hand and full support from our communities, is a huge plus for us. So we’re all systems go, our focus has always been curved by them, it’s always been having the drills really tell the truth on this thing and that hasn’t changed one bit from what’s happening in the background with the election.

Bill: Ivan as we wrap it up, would you like to share any final thoughts?

Ivan: Yeah, just on that. Peter touched on my international experience. I’ve done business in Mongolia, I’ve done business in Ghana, West Africa, and Ghana was interesting. The government took 10% of your project from day one so they had a 10% carried interest, meaning you did all the work, you spend all the money, you got to keep 90% plus you paid taxes, right? They also had a three and a half percent in stock and we were successful with Keegan finding five million ounces in that environment and the stock went from 50 cents to $9 per share, $900 million market cap at the time. So if we can do that in that environment, which is far more challenging than what we’re talking about in Peru, in terms of current layout and what might change, that’s really positive. Secondly, elections are great, they draw a lot of attention, I mean, as we’re seeing here, there’s a lot of drama around them because the world is going through a lot of change.

It just went through COVID, there’s going to be a global taxation effort that’s going to be across all industries and all people and we’re all prepared to face that. I think specifically for Peru, you’re looking at a deadlock really divided really, really tight race, which I think predicates on minimal change no matter who wins because they won’t have that landslide overwhelming control and I think so it’s kind of over done on the drama down there. Castillo made some remarks in his preliminaries and it scared a few people but remarks Humala made in the last election were much more aggressive and nothing got really that bad. The permitting slowed down a little bit, we don’t think that could be much slower, however, we’re navigating appropriately. And if you listen to Castillo and what he’s advocating for it’s to do more for the communities and that’s something we’ve done incredibly well from the start, not just on Tier One but on Sombrero. We put the communities first, we treat things socially with sustainable longterm views of having the mine based on our confidence.

And if we’re going to make the effort everybody should benefit and I’m actually in favor of doing more for the local people that are affected by the mines, I’m actually supportive of that. So the last point I’ll make is the word tax, and the reason why I love and hate the word tax, I hate the word tax because I have to pay a bill but the reason why I love it is because I’m making money when I have to pay tax. So you either want to make a lot of money and pay a lot of tax or you don’t want to make a lot of money and don’t pay a lot of tax, I’d rather the first of those two comments so I’m not afraid. I know Nevada recently is making an effort to increase their taxes, that’s the best mining jurisdiction in the world.

I think we will see where it can be applied globally on the backside of COVID. I think there’s going to be a definitely a new landscape for all of us but it does not change the scarcity of big discoveries that’s become way more difficult to find. And so metal shortages, metal prices going up, taxes going up, it’s a very, very interesting place. As an investor are you going to be penalized more by increased taxes on the company that’s exploring? Or are you going to benefit more because no one is finding what we’re looking for, these world-class huge major 20 to 50 year mine life type of projects, right? I’d go on and say that, if we make the discovery, the taxes, everything is going to be fairly irrelevant fairly quickly in the sense that it’s so hard to make these discoveries, it’s so rare to find them the value and premium that is going to be applied is going to be substantial.

And I don’t see Peruvian government, whoever wins it, I don’t see them blowing their foot off with a shotgun by collapsing the favorable foreign investment climate that they currently have. I see adjustments as we’re seeing in Chile, but again, I don’t think a country with a history of mining that they’ve had, where they haven’t punished any company to that extent or nationalist previously, I don’t see anything like that on the horizon. I refer back to we’re trading now and we’ve got a drill turning next week, if we felt there was any kind of serious risk as prudent business people, we would pull back and wait, but we’re not, we’re going full steam ahead. And we have that confidence and we’re trading now and family members are accumulating shares and that’s where my family is at today, they’re doing that with the political in the background, they’re doing that with everything going on and they wanted some shots at this thing because we think that’s been given a lot of attention for a good reason but we don’t think it’s going to be as bad as advertised going forward. Thank you.