Kneipe Setlhare

Mr. Kneipe Setlhare is a mining engineer with over 14 years of experience in mining operations management, including roles with BCL Mines and Smelting as mine supervisor and business improvement coordinator from 2006 to 2011, and later joined Australian firm Discovery Metals Limited where the Boseto Copper project was successfully commissioned into production until its unfortunate liquidation in 2014. Kneipe is the founder of Marcelle Holdings Limited, a local prospecting and Exploration Company which successfully vended some of its prospecting licenses to Giyani Metals Corp in 2016. He is currently Executive Country Manager at Giyani Metals Corp, a public company listed in Toronto Stock Exchange and he is in charge of compliance with Government regulations, stakeholder consultation and managing community relations, contractor management and country office administration, ensuring that the company stays in good standing order as a subsidiary of public company. He is also the Country Manager of Premium Nickel Resources based in Gaborone. Mr. Setlhare has years of experience managing both private and public companies involved in early stage exploration, preliminary economic assessment, feasibility study at Giyani Metals, mine development and commissioning at Discovery Metals , mine asset acquisitions and disposals at Lerala Diamond Mine and Mowana Copper Mine.

Charles Riopel

Mr. Riopel is an accomplished senior-level executive with over 25 years domestic/international investment experience in mining. He has managed over the year’s both private and public investment funds. He is the founder and managing partner at Latitude 45, a private equity fund specialized in mining. Prior thereto, he was Senior Investment Director at The Sentient Group, one of the largest PE Funds in mining with over US$2.7 billion under management. At The Sentient Group, he worked on and completed 12 follow-on investments as well as one exit – actively managing investments and re-engineering projects in copper, gold, uranium, nickel and manganese.

From 2006 to 2012, he served as Senior Investment Director Metals & Mining at the SGF, a public fund with over US$5.0 billion under management. During these years, he invested approximately US200M$ per year in mining projects, from greenfield exploration to operations, directly managing drilling programs to approximately US$ 6 billion in construction. While working at the SGF he invested in, directly managed, turned around and exited more than 20 investments and mining projects.

On several occasions throughout his career, he was directly responsible for the re-engineering of mining projects from geology to construction, delivering outstanding returns to investors. He has worked on several investment projects that are located in Africa, and has ties going back to the creation of LionOre Mining International in July 1997 and the purchase of Tati Nickel Mining by LionOre Mining International from Anglo American in 2002.

He was appointed to the Board of Directors of Premium Nickel Resources in 2019 and is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of PNR. He is also Interim-Chairman of the Board of Directors of North American Nickel (mining exploration – Ni), Chairman of the Board of Directors of Meridian Mining SE (mining Cu-Au-Mn), and a member of the Board of Directors of Aligo Innovation (VC Fund), and the Foundation of Greater Montreal (local charity managing over US250M$ in charitable donations). He has served as a director and/or officer of several Canadian and international companies. He holds a Bachelor of Economics from Montreal University and a Masters in Business Administration from Laval University.

Keith Morrison

Keith has continuously served on resource and technology, private and public company Boards of Directors since 1986, and as a CEO since 1988. During this period, Keith has been in leadership positions during multiple commodity cycles and through several black swan events including Bre-X (1997), 9-11 (2001), Lehman Brothers (2008) and the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020).

In 1986 Keith co-founded Quantec Geophysics, a leading global technology/resource service company in Canada. He moved to the US in 1988 to open Quantec’s first foreign subsidiary, working applying deep exploration technologies to the emerging Carlin style gold deposits. The company implemented a globalization strategy of creating advanced subsurface imaging technologies, and providing these as a proprietary service, through a network of wholly owned international subsidiaries. The application of these technologies played a major role in the discovery of the Collahuasi Copper mine in Chile in 1990. This enabled Quantec to dominate porphyry copper geophysical exploration in Latin America.

In 1992 Keith began market development in China and Mongolia. Ultimately this led to the co-founding of QGX Limited and the discovery and development of Baruun Naran coal resource, which was ultimately sold in 2008 for $300mm.

In 1997 Keith completed a C$7.5mm equity financing in Quantec with Falconbridge and Barrick Gold to fund the development of the Titan24 brownfield deep exploration system. This revolutionary system combined full pre-stack, time-series data with distributed, simultaneous, spatial over sampling of broad band electric and magnetic fields, to enable high precision electrical imaging to 1500m depths. The system’s high-quality data supported the advancement of Common Earth Modeling technologies advancing inversion capability to integrate calibrated petrophysical 3-D geological reference models.

The long-term relationship with Falconbridge enabled Quantec to provide advanced geophysical imaging solutions to their global nickel exploration and mine assets.

By the time Keith retired from Quantec in 2008, and began to lead a non-competitive high technology defense/resource imaging firm, the company had completed over 3000 projects, in more than 50 countries, opened domestic subsidiaries in 12 countries and was partially owned by Barrick and Xstrata.

It had averaged an 18% revenue growth rate for the 22 years. The company had never lost money on an individual contract, due to a corporate culture committed to real-time on-site project management and honest, safe, hard work.

Since 2000, Keith has led multiple risk-equity financings, totally over C$100M in equity. Sources of capital ranging from high net worth individuals, family offices, private equity, public institutions, public retail, major corporate strategics, sovereign wealth funds and pensions.

Keith is currently CEO and a Director of TSXV listed North American Nickel Company. The company is a leading data driven nickel-copper-cobalt exploration company with a strong capital table supported by Sentient EP (Australian PE), Duke University Endowment (DUMAC) and Contemporary Amperex Technologies Limited (the largest Li-Ion manufacturer in the world based in Ningde, China.) NAN is executing a global strategy to develop high quality Ni-Cu-Co assets in countries that have clear Rule-of-Law and that make economic sense using conservative long-term commodity prices. The company’s main assets are in Greenland, Canada and the United States.

On a private investment basis, Keith is a partner in 50 King Capital (a private Merchant Bank) that looks at stressed resource assets for growth opportunities. In 2015, 50 King Capital purchased all of the Cliffs Natural Resources’ non-producing assets as the company was collapsing towards bankruptcy. He is an Honors graduate in Engineering from Queen’s University (1978) and the Rotman Business School ICD program (2009). Keith is a member of the Association of Professional Geoscientists (APGO number 0676) and the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD).