How to Conduct Technical Due Diligence on a Gilgit-Baltistan Concession Portfolio

Most buyers who fly in to look at our concessions want to see rock first. That's the wrong order.

I've had teams from Guangzhou, Dubai and Munich sit across from me over the last three years, and the ones who left with signed off-take terms weren't the ones who spent the longest at the outcrop. They were the ones who spent two full days on paperwork before they ever put boots on a trail. Honestly, I used to think that was overcautious. Then I watched a serious European group walk away from a genuinely good molybdenum showing because the title chain had a gap nobody had disclosed.

So let me walk through how I'd run technical due diligence on a Gilgit-Baltistan portfolio if I were sitting on your side of the table.

Start with the licence, not the lithology

GB has its own mineral regime — it's not Punjab, not Balochistan, and not KP. The Gilgit-Baltistan Mines and Minerals Act (2018 amendments matter) governs concessions here, and the Directorate of Mines and Minerals in Gilgit is the issuing authority. Not Islamabad. That confuses first-time entrants constantly.

Before anything else, ask for:

• The original grant letter and its expiry date
• Any renewals, with the renewal fee receipts
• A survey map with GPS-verified corner coordinates (not a hand-drawn sketch — you'd be surprised)
• The category of licence: Reconnaissance, Exploration, or Mining Lease. These are not interchangeable and the work obligations differ
• Proof of annual rent and royalty payments to the GB government
• Any No-Objection Certificates from the local district administration and, where relevant, the Forest Department

One thing people miss: some blocks sit inside or brush against community-owned (shamilat) land. That doesn't kill a project, but it does mean you need a local benefit agreement negotiated with the numberdars before you truck anything out. I've seen a copper prospect near Chalt held up for 14 months because that conversation was skipped.

Also ask about overlap. GB has had cases where two licences were issued over partially overlapping polygons in the same valley. It's rare now, but the mapping isn't perfectly digitised yet. Cross-check the coordinates against the Directorate's cadastre in person if you can.

Then the geology, and be honest about the maturity of it

Here's the thing about Pakistan mining DD that most Western consultants don't quite grasp: very few GB concessions have JORC or NI 43-101 compliant resources. Not because the rock isn't there — it demonstrably is — but because the drilling capital hasn't flowed at the scale needed to define it under those codes. So when you evaluate a portfolio here, you're usually evaluating an exploration-stage asset with strong surface evidence, historical work, and channel sampling. Not a defined reserve.

What you should ask for and actually scrutinise:

Sampling protocol. How were the grab and channel samples taken? Who logged them? Which lab? For our own work we use SGS Pakistan and, for check assays, a lab in Ürümqi. If a seller can't tell you the QA/QC chain — blanks, duplicates, standards — treat the assay numbers as indicative, not proven.

Structural context. A 4.2% Cu grab sample means very little if it's from a 30 cm gossan lens with no strike continuity. Ask for mapped strike length, dip, and any trenching results. On our Chilas-area copper block we've traced a mineralised shear over 1.8 km of surface expression — that's the sort of thing that actually matters.

Historical data. GSP (Geological Survey of Pakistan) has done reconnaissance across most of GB going back to the 1970s. Their memoirs are public. A good seller will hand you the GSP reference and let you cross-check. A nervous seller won't mention them.

The critical minerals angle. For antimony, tungsten, molybdenum — the ones EU and US buyers are chasing right now — get XRF field readings backed by ICP-MS lab work. Antimony in particular can be visually deceptive. Stibnite looks obvious but grade varies wildly across a single vein.

And look — if someone shows you a single spectacular assay (say, 38 g/t Au from one rock chip) without a second sample within 50 metres of it, that's a story, not a deposit. I've walked buyers away from our own showings when the data wasn't yet good enough to justify their time.

The stuff that kills deals after signing

This is where I'd focus a third of the DD budget, and where most people spend almost nothing.

Access. Is the block reachable by jeep track, or is it a 6-hour mule trek from the nearest road? That determines whether a 500-tonne bulk sample is a two-week job or a two-season job. On our Bunji and Skardu jade blocks we can drive to within 400 m of the working face. On one of our tungsten prospects above 4,100 m, we get roughly 5 months of operational weather per year. Both are workable. They're just very different capex profiles.

Power and water. No grid at most sites. Diesel gensets, or micro-hydro if the nallah has year-round flow. Water for processing is usually not the constraint people from arid regions assume — GB has glacial meltwater in abundance — but sediment loads are heavy and settling ponds need planning.

Export routing. KKH to Sost and into Xinjiang is the shortest route for anything heading to Chinese smelters. Karachi via the N-35 and motorway network is roughly 1,750 km and takes 4 to 6 days for a container. Both work. Neither is frictionless. Ask about winter closures at Khunjerab (usually 1 December to 1 April, though it's shifted).

Community. Every valley has its own dynamics. What worked in Hunza will not work in Astore. A DD trip that doesn't include a sit-down with local elders is incomplete, even if the geologist thinks it's soft-side fluff. It isn't. It's the difference between a mine that runs and a mine that gets blockaded.

One last thing on concession due diligence in this region

Don't outsource the whole thing to an international consultancy that's never worked north of Islamabad. Use them for the technical review — SRK, Behre Dolbear, whoever you trust — but pair them with someone who actually knows the GB Directorate, the district administration, and how mineral titles move here. The mining due diligence that works in Zambia or Kazakhstan doesn't fully transplant. The geology is world-class. The paperwork is its own discipline.

If you're preparing a DD trip and want the licence documents and assay files for specific blocks in advance, we send them under NDA before anyone gets on a plane. Saves everyone a week.