Gareth Solly

Gareth Solly is chief executive officer and executive director of Auric Mining (ASX: AWJ), a Western Australian gold company moving from toll treating — paying a third-party mill to process its ore for a fee — to standalone gold production. He is best known as the founder of Black Cat Syndicate (ASX: BC8), which he built from a A$6 million exploration IPO into a producer of roughly 100,000 ounces of gold a year with a market capitalization that approached A$1 billion. His 2026 move to Auric puts that explorer-to-producer record to work on a second company.

At Black Cat, Solly assembled about 2.5 million ounces in JORC resources (JORC is the Australian standard for reporting the size and grade of a deposit) and carried the company from explorer to producer. The Kal East project, anchored by the Myhree discovery in 2018, poured first gold in October 2024 from a resource of more than 1.2 million ounces. In March 2025 he bought the nearby Lakewood mill, a move that cut about 15 months off the development timeline; the plant poured its first gold — 757 ounces — within three weeks of takeover and ran at up to 1.2 million tonnes a year.

The build-out was transaction-driven. He bought the mothballed Paulsens mine — 907,244 ounces at 7.3 g/t (grams per tonne) between 2005 and 2017 — out of care and maintenance in 2022 and tripled its resource the following year. He acquired the Fingals and Rowes Find projects from Silver Lake Resources in 2020 and added the Coyote gold operation in the Tanami. He also pushed Black Cat into antimony, advancing Mt Clement — 13,200 tonnes of contained antimony at 1.7% — as one of Australia's largest and highest-grade deposits of a critical metal that China, Russia and Tajikistan supply about 90% of. Before Black Cat, he held senior roles at Silver Lake and Saracen Minerals across more than 25 years in the industry.

His method is consistent: acquire proven but underused assets — dormant mines, idle mills — refurbish them on time and on budget, and reach production quickly. He structures deals so that sellers become shareholders, as Silver Lake did at Black Cat, and targets ground with minimal barriers to mining. At Black Cat he summed up the approach as "more gold (and antimony), sooner." Just as important is the processing side of the business: knowing how to turn ore into bars, not just how to find ounces.

At Auric since May 2026, Solly is refurbishing the Burbanks plant near Coolgardie (500,000 tonnes a year, with capacity under review) so the company can process its Munda deposit instead of paying third-party mills. Munda's starter pit beat forecasts by 46% with 8,886 ounces, the main pit hosts about 145,000 ounces, and an integrated Burbanks-Munda scoping study — a preliminary check of whether a project can be mined at a profit — sets out the standalone path, backed by about A$43 million in cash, bullion and listed investments. Whether the Black Cat playbook repeats at Auric is a concrete reason for gold investors to follow what he does next.