West Red Lake signs US$95M loan-and-offtake term sheet with Centalion

West Red Lake Gold has signed a binding term sheet for a US$95 million credit facility with Centalion, through its contracting arm Gunvor USA LLC. The money comes in two tranches — Tranche 1 of up to US$65 million and a second tranche of US$30 million — and would be used to pay off the company’s existing loan from Nebari. Bundled with the loan is an offtake agreement: Centalion would buy 100% of the gold doré (the rough gold-silver bars a mine pours before refining) from the Madsen Mine in Ontario’s Red Lake district. This is a financing announcement, not a drill result — there are no grades, widths, or holes to weigh here.

Why it matters is a balance-sheet story. The old Nebari facility carried a punishing rate — three-month SOFR plus 8%, with a 4% floor — the kind of price a lender charges a borrower who can’t get bank terms. The proposed Centalion rate, one-month SOFR plus 5.50%, is cheaper, though still well short of investment grade. The man steering this is CEO Shane Williams, who took Eldorado’s Lamaque project from study to commercial production in 18 months and declared commercial production at Madsen in January 2026. Madsen itself has baggage: the previous owner, Pure Gold Mining, went insolvent in 2022 after failing to reach commercial production, and West Red Lake bought the asset out of that failure. Against this news the stock fell 20% over three months while the junior gold index slipped just 1.5% and gold itself dropped 3.3% — a roughly 18-point gap too wide to blame on a soft sector, pointing to company-specific selling.

What to watch carries real caveats. This is a binding term sheet, not closed money — funding remains subject to due diligence, definitive documents, security delivery, and regulatory approvals, and Tranche 2 carries additional unspecified conditions. The offtake is incomplete on paper: no duration, no pricing formula, and no delivery volume are disclosed, and handing all doré to one buyer is a constraint the release does not quantify. There is also a naming question — the release calls Gunvor USA “the relevant subsidiary of Centalion Group,” while Centalion’s own archive refers to Gunvor Group Ltd as parent, a wrinkle worth clarifying before closing. The next hard catalysts: an integrated Madsen-Rowan pre-feasibility study the company says it expects to release in coming weeks, and the actual closing of the facility — timing not stated.

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