Lion One Metals Limited, the North Vancouver-based company that owns the Tuvatu Alkaline Gold Project in Fiji, has reported a fresh batch of high-grade gold results from underground drilling at the mine, headlined by 4.6 metres grading 82.28 grams of gold per tonne — a little over 2.6 troy ounces of gold in every tonne of rock. The results come from 4,370.20 metres of underground infill and grade control drilling in the mine’s Zone 5, according to the company release distributed by Newsfile Corp. and carried by The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail dates its posting 23 September 2026, while the release text itself carries the date 24 September 2026.
First, what Tuvatu is
For readers who do not follow the stock, Tuvatu is not a distant prospect on a map. On the company’s own account it is a working underground mine on Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island, roughly 40 km southwest of Vatukoula — the country’s long-established gold mine, and the local reference point the releases themselves reach for. Gold has been dug commercially in Fiji since the 1930s at Vatukoula; Tuvatu is the newer of the two operations, and the one still being built out level by level.
The two announcements sketch that build-out in passing: a main decline and a separate Western Decline, drill stations cut into the rock at the 1082, 1103 and 1160 levels, and mining levels numbered 1048, 1066, 1116, 1150 and 1170. The August release says the Ura and Murau lodes were first mined in 2025 and that the Ura shrinkage stope on Level 1116 returned 5,704 tonnes at 10.6 g/t gold — on those numbers, about 60 kilograms, or roughly 1,940 ounces, of contained gold before any processing losses. That is the scale to keep in mind while reading the drill figures below: a small, high-grade underground operation, not a bulk-tonnage open pit.
Key facts
- Lion One (TSXV: LIO, OTCQX: LOMLF) owns 100 per cent of Tuvatu, the company says.
- Thirty of 34 completed drillholes intersected high-grade mineralisation; three further holes were abandoned.
- The release contains eight intersects above 100 g/t gold, the company says.
- Individual assays reported include 547.05 g/t over 0.3 m, 502.48 g/t over 0.3 m, 350.00 g/t over 0.4 m, 302.15 g/t over 0.4 m, 301.58 g/t over 0.4 m and 285.13 g/t over 0.3 m — all of them very short intervals.
- Most high-grade intersects sit within 25 m of existing underground development and are anticipated to be incorporated into the mine plan within the next six months.
How to read a gold grade
Grams per tonne is simply how much gold sits in a tonne of rock. The headline 82.28 g/t is a little over 2.6 troy ounces per tonne; the 715.15 g/t reported in August is close to 23 ounces. Two things temper those figures. The first is length: a 547.05 g/t hit over 0.3 m is a sliver of rock, and Lion One notes that the minimum mining width at Tuvatu is about 1.5 m, so narrow high-grade slivers are mined together with weaker material around them. The second is that these are drill core assays, which describe rock in place — not reserves, not mill feed, and not revenue.
Why it matters for Fiji
Lion One’s central claim is one of proximity rather than discovery: the drilled ground is not a distant exploration target but part of the near-term mine plan, with areas targeted for production within six months. Some of the intersects, the company says, are already being developed with accesses and drives in preparation for stoping on levels 1048, 1066, 1150 and 1170. If that holds, the material moves from press release to mill within a year — which is what separates this from the exploration announcements that cross the wires most weeks.
The Fiji context is harder to pin down from the documents themselves. Hard-rock mining is a narrow slice of an economy dominated by tourism, remittances and sugar, and it is concentrated in the two gold operations on Viti Levu; a second producing mine expanding its underground reserves therefore matters more to the communities and contractors around Sabeto and Nadi than it does to national accounts. Royalty and lease terms are set through Fiji’s mining authorities rather than through a market release, and neither document touches them.
Neither announcement gives a production forecast, an employment figure, a royalty payment or any amount in Fiji dollars, so nothing in them can be read directly against government revenue or the labour market. Readers tracking the wider Fiji economy will find those numbers elsewhere, in coverage such as the ADB’s $210m package for Fiji.
What was drilled in Zone 5
The programme targeted the up-dip and down-dip extensions of the UR lodes in Zone 5, drilled from two near-surface underground drill stations, the 1160 and the 1082. Drilling from the 1160 station primarily targeted mineralisation up-dip of the 1150 level; drilling from the 1082 station primarily targeted mineralisation down-dip of the 1066 level. The company describes these as the uppermost and lowermost areas of active mining in Zone 5 — in other words, the drilling is working outwards from the edges of what is already being mined.
Each station targeted a 100 m strike length of the UR lodes, at a drill spacing of 12.5 m by 12.5 m. That tight spacing is the signature of grade control work: it is the density used to decide where a stope goes, not the wider pattern used to test new ground. Lion One says the current total strike length of the UR2 lode is approximately 620 m and that it remains open along strike and at depth.
How the deposit is described
The Zone 5 area lies along the main decline at Tuvatu and includes the north-south oriented UR1 to UR3 and URW1 to URW3 lodes and the northeast-southwest oriented UR4 to UR8 lodes, according to the company. These steeply dipping structures converge at about 500 m depth to form Zone 500, which Lion One calls the highest-grade part of the deposit and interprets as a major feeder zone. The system remains open at depth, with the deepest high-grade intersections occurring below 1,000 m.
Last month’s Zone 2 result
The September announcement follows an August release, published as sponsored content by Mining.com, reporting 4.2 m of 715.15 g/t gold from Zone 2 on the west side of the deposit. That interval, drilled 55 m from the Western Decline, cut a shallow-dipping roscoelite-bearing vein in the Murau lode system, the company says.
That programme covered 3,337.30 metres from a single drill station on the 1103 level and targeted the southern and down-dip extensions of the Ura and Murau lodes below level 1061, the lowest level of underground development in Zone 2. Fourteen of 18 drillholes hit high-grade mineralisation, with three holes abandoned.
The difference between the two releases is worth drawing out, because the company draws it itself. Lion One said the August results were in an area of limited prior drilling and outside the current resource, and would be incorporated into the mine plan within twelve months. The September Zone 5 results, by contrast, sit inside ground the mine is already developing and carry a six-month timeline. Read together, the pair describe two different jobs running at once: tightening up what is about to be mined on the east side, and pushing into less-tested ground on the west.
Company president and chief executive Ian Berzins, quoted in the September release, said: “We are actively drilling both Zone 5 and Zone 2 at Tuvatu, and we continue to intersect exceptional grades on both sides of the mine.”
Background and comparisons
The Murau lodes are flat to shallow-dipping structures the company says are known locally as “flatmakes”, a term also used at the Vatukoula gold mine 40 km northeast of Tuvatu — a reminder that the vocabulary, and much of the workforce skill base, for underground gold mining in Fiji predates Tuvatu by decades. Lion One also draws a comparison with the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea, which it says has produced over 25 million ounces of gold. Such comparisons are the company’s own framing rather than an independent assessment of how alike the two systems are.
The caveats the company states
All intervals are downhole lengths reported at a 3.0 g/t gold cut-off, and true widths are not known because of local variability in structural orientation, Lion One says. That matters: a downhole length is longer than the true thickness of a vein unless the hole happens to cut it square. The minimum mining width at Tuvatu is approximately 1.5 m, and intervals below 3 g/t are excluded from the company’s figures.
On sampling, the company says it inserts one blank, one field duplicate and one certified reference material every 50 samples, and that assays are run in its own geochemical laboratory, accredited under IANZ ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for gold. The Qualified Person named under Canada’s NI 43-101 standard, chief geologist Melvyn Levrel, is stated in the release to be an employee of Lion One and not independent of it.
What we could not independently confirm
Both documents underpinning this report are company news releases rather than independent reporting. The Globe and Mail item is a Newsfile distribution carried on its markets pages, not staff journalism, and the Mining.com item is labelled sponsored content. The two also disagree on a basic detail — the posting date of 23 September against a release text dated 24 September.
No analyst note on either drill programme, no statement from Fiji’s mining authorities and no comment from landowners or communities near the mine was available for this report. Lion One has not published a resource or reserve update alongside these results, so the assays cannot yet be weighed against the mine’s stated resource. Nor is there an independent confirmation of the assays themselves, which were produced in-house. None of that makes the numbers wrong; it does mean they currently rest on a single source, the company that owns the mine.
Neither release addresses Fiji regulatory or fiscal questions of the kind raised in debates over Fiji’s place on the EU tax blacklist. We will update this report if the company, an independent analyst or the Fiji authorities add to the record.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a grade of 82.28 g/t gold actually mean?
It means that, on the company’s assays, one tonne of the rock in that 4.6-metre interval contains 82.28 grams of gold — a little over 2.6 troy ounces. The comparable figure from the August release, 715.15 g/t, works out at roughly 23 troy ounces a tonne. These are grades of rock in the ground over short intervals, not an average grade for the mine and not a statement of how much metal will be recovered at the mill.
Is Tuvatu already in production, or is this exploration?
Both announcements describe an operating underground mine. They refer to a main decline and a Western Decline, to drill stations cut at the 1082, 1103 and 1160 levels, and to mining levels numbered 1048, 1066, 1116, 1150 and 1170. The August release says the Ura and Murau lodes were first mined in 2025 and that the Ura shrinkage stope on Level 1116 returned 5,704 tonnes at 10.6 g/t gold. The drilling reported in September is infill and grade control work inside that mine, not a greenfield search.
Has any independent party verified these results?
Not in the material available for this report. Both documents are company news releases — one distributed by Newsfile Corp. and carried by The Globe and Mail, the other published by Mining.com as sponsored content. The Qualified Person who signed off is a Lion One employee and the release states he is not independent of the company, and the assays were run in Lion One’s own laboratory. No analyst note, Fiji Mineral Resources Department statement or landowner comment on the drilling was available at the time of writing.
What is the highest gold grade ever returned at Tuvatu?
According to the August release carried by Mining.com, the highest-grade assay result ever returned at Tuvatu is 6,571.20 g/t over 0.45 m, from the Zone 2 drilling. Earlier very high-grade results listed by the company include 2,749.86 g/t over 0.3 m, 1,986.23 g/t over 0.6 m, 1,568.55 g/t over 0.3 m and 1,517.79 g/t over 0.3 m. Intervals that short contribute very little tonnage, however high the grade.
Why does Lion One make a point of mentioning roscoelite?
The company says roscoelite mineralisation is a defining characteristic of alkaline gold systems and is directly associated with high-grade gold, per the release on Mining.com. It points to the same mineral assemblage at Porgera in Papua New Guinea, where the Stage II quartz-roscoelite-pyrite veins of Zone VII yielded 5.1 million ounces of gold at 27 g/t.
Who signed off on the technical content of the announcement?
The Globe and Mail release names Melvyn Levrel, MAIG, Lion One’s Chief Geologist, as the Qualified Person under Canada’s NI 43-101 disclosure standard, and states he is an employee of the company and not independent of it. Lion One says it inserts one blank, one field duplicate and one certified reference material every 50 samples, and that its own geochemical laboratory is accredited under IANZ ISO/IEC 17025:2017 for gold assays.
Has any of this rock already been mined?
Yes, in part. The Globe and Mail release says holes TGC-0504 and TGC-0526 were drilled near the 1120 shrink stope, which has since been mined and processed, and that production results from that stope will be reported separately. In Zone 2, the August release says the Ura shrinkage stope on Level 1116 returned 5,704 tonnes at 10.6 g/t gold.
