TMX Group

STLLR management at the countdown to the Feb. 12 opening of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Signals successful Nighthawk, Moneta merger.

STLLR Gold Inc. Feb. 12 opened trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, signaling the successful merger between former Nighthawk Gold Corp. and Moneta Gold Inc.

Attended by former president and CEO of Nighthawk, Keyvan Salehi, who now sits as president and CEO of STLLR, the new management team at STLLR, and Omar Khafagy, manager of corporate access at TSX, the company celebrated its recent merger with the successful opening of a publicly traded entity.

First announced in late November, the successful merger that completed Feb. 6, resulted in a stronger gold exploration company with two flagship Canadian projects, Nighthawk's Colomac gold project on the Indin Lake property in Northwest Territories, and Moneta's Tower gold project in the prolific Timmins Mining Camp in Ontario.

"We believe that the transaction presents an exciting opportunity to create a leading gold development company by bringing together two cornerstone assets in Canada," Salehi and Moneta interim CEO Josef Vejvoda said in a joint statement announcing the merger. "The combined company will benefit from a strong balance sheet, led by a skilled leadership team, and a high-quality portfolio anchored by two robust, large-scale assets in established and emerging mining camps."

With preliminary economic assessments outlining the potential for a mine at Colomac that would produce an average of 290,000 ounces of gold annually over 11 years of mining and a second at Tower that would average more than 190,000 oz annually for 11 years, the combined has two advanced staged Canadian miner projects with the potential to produce a total of nearly half a million of gold each year for over a decade.

With overwhelming support from its shareholders toward the merger, ample cash in its coffers from a round of funding by Nighthawk in December, and the successful launching of its market through TSX, STLLR Gold is well-positioned to emerge as a leading Canadian gold developer and a tantalizing buyout target for even the weightiest of majors.