Tom Obradovich

Tom Obradovich is President, CEO and a director of Conquest Resources Limited (TSXV: CQR), a Toronto-based explorer, incorporated in 1945, that he has redirected toward the Valimaki Gold Project in southwestern Finland. He funded that move by selling the company's flagship Belfast-Teck Mag copper-gold property for shares and a royalty, a transaction typical of how he has operated for more than 38 years. A graduate of the Haileybury School of Mines in Mining Technology and Advanced Field Geophysics, he has spent his career founding, financing and selling junior exploration companies.

His deal record is verifiable. He co-founded Canadian Royalties Inc., which discovered and developed the Raglan South nickel belt in Quebec. He assembled much of the Matachewan gold camp and, through a reverse takeover of Young-Davidson Mines (taking over a listed company to bring private assets public), upgraded and doubled the resource; Northgate Minerals bought the project in 2005, and it now produces more than 200,000 ounces of gold a year for Alamos Gold. He was one of the founders of Aurelian Resources, whose Fruta del Norte gold discovery in Ecuador was acquired by Kinross Gold. He also raised the initial capital for U3O8 Corp., a uranium developer in Guyana.

Later assignments reinforced the same pattern. As President and CEO of Barkerville Gold Mines from January 2015 to July 2016, he left the company debt-free with a market capitalization above $200 million and $60 million in treasury. As lead director of Dalradian Resources from 2011, he was part of the team that advanced the multi-million-ounce Curraghinalt gold project in Northern Ireland, which was later sold to Orion Mine Finance for $560 million. He took control of Sable Resources in December 2016 and remains its chairman; its Don Julio project in San Juan Province, Argentina, is now a joint venture with South32.

His approach is asset assembly plus disciplined exits: acquire or option overlooked ground, re-list it through mergers, fund it with equity, and sell when the market pays, while keeping upside through share consideration and royalties (an NSR, or net smelter royalty, is a percentage of revenue from future metal production). At Conquest he exchanged the Belfast-Teck Mag package for 8 million Inventus Mining shares and a 2% NSR, then concentrated the treasury on Valimaki, where 2026 till sampling (tracing gold grains in glacial sediment back to their bedrock source) outlined multiple gold-in-till anomalies with values up to 499.9 ppb gold and drill targets are being permitted for a Q4 2026 program. Following him means watching a veteran junior-mining operator run the full cycle: monetize non-core assets, retain exposure, and focus capital on one high-grade target.