Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh Mineral Beneficiation (Pty) Ltd is a private company registered in the Republic of South Africa, which has acquired the expertise and know-how to actively undertake the manufacturing of high value-added metal-derived chemicals and intermediates based on cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium. The raw materials will be sourced mainly from the by-products of the local platinum-group metal industry and, also, from mineral resources from the DRC and Zambia copper-belt and other Southern African countries. and cobalt mining industries.
Olmek
The company is currently owned 100% by Olmek, a start-up company having as its main objective the beneficiation of the abundant mineral resources present in Southern Africa. The high-value-added products envisaged are destined for export to Europe, South- Eastern Asia and the Americas.
History of Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh was founded in 2014 by a Team of professional engineers with substantial industrial experience in companies such as SAMANCOR, NECSA, SASOL, CSIR and Scaw Metals with the backing of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) of South Africa. At a later stage, Dr Alex Sofianos became a partner, a well-known industrialist and professor of Chemical Engineering, who for several years was a Director of Knightsbridge Cobalt Corporation, for which he designed the Solvent Extraction based Refinery, a first in South Africa and the Downstream Products Plant. Thereafter Dr Sofianos was instrumental in the creation of the MetaChemica Group of Companies of which he was the CEO for about 10 years. MetaChemica had been in existence until 2011 and ran a 10 ton per month cobalt beneficiation business, including leaching plant and refinery and producing cobalt and copper oxides and carbonates of ceramic and electronic grade. The company was voluntarily liquidated when some of the other shareholders attempted to change the strategic focus of the company towards fluorine chemicals.