Deep Yellow Limited has appointed Nedbank Limited as the mandated lead arranger and sole bookrunner to coordinate and arrange project financing for its flagship Tumas Project in Namibia.
According to Deep Yellow Managing Director and CEO John Borshoff, Nedbank’s track record in uranium project financing across Africa, coupled with its past successful collaborations, makes them the ideal partner for this endeavour.
Nedbank will oversee the due diligence and documentation processes as part of forming a banking syndicate for project financing.
Borshoff says the proposed project financing is expected to deliver a competitively priced cost of funding for project development.
“Key to this process from a Deep Yellow perspective will be working with Nedbank to implement the optimal level of offtake commitments required to access debt funding, whilst ensuring maximum upside uranium price exposure,” the CEO says.
Over the past seven years, Deep Yellow has focused on building a company that is uniquely positioned in the uranium sector with two substantial Greenfield projects and to become a producer with multiple mines during this decade.
“We are very pleased to be initiating the project financing process for the Tumas development, particularly to be working with Nedbank again. Their extensive experience in Africa with a strong track record in financing uranium projects combined with our economically and technically robust project is a perfect match,” he said.
The project finance process will proceed concurrently with ongoing detailed engineering efforts.
“We aim to be in a position to announce FID in Q4 CY2024 and it is pleasing that our schedule is holding for production start-up during Q3 CY2026,” he added.
The flagship Tumas project is expected to cost N$6 billion (US$360.5 million) according to re-costing study findings from N$7.3 billion (US$385.1 million) projected from the definitive feasibility study (DFS). The uranium developer earlier this year secured binding commitments to raise N$2.7 billion through a placement to develop the project.
