Atlanta company raising money to raise treasure
Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Randy Southerland Contributing Writer
An Atlanta company called Admiralty Corp. thinks it has found a way to raise millions or even billions of dollars of treasure from shipwrecks.
Now the company just needs to raise a small fortune itself.
Admiralty Corp. officials say a Georgia Tech scientist who works with the company, James Larsen, has developed a proprietary electromagnetic technology that can locate metals on the ocean floor, and even distinguish between metals such as gold, silver, platinum, aluminum, copper, steel and iron while also giving a good indication of the quantity of each metal.
Executives say the technology sets Admiralty apart from all other treasure-hunting companies and gives it a leg up in the race to find billions of dollars worth of gold and silver that went down in various ships over the centuries.
"The problem in the [recovery] industry is there's nothing that can locate and identify different metals and then quantify what is there," said Herbert C. Leeming, president and CEO of Admiralty. "We developed that technology over the years, and we have filed the [applications for] patents on that technology."
The company plans to use the technology for the first time very soon, searching for sunken ships off the coast of Jamaica. But to fund that expedition, Admiralty needs to raise an additional
$6 million by selling stock to investors through "private placements."
Finding funding
And now it hopes it has found a way to do that. On May 29, in a move to gain access to new sources of capital, Admiralty merged with a publicly traded shell company (one that can sell stock but that has no substantial assets or business of its own). The shell company, called Ruby Mining Co., was reduced to a virtual shell corporation following declines in the mining industry, and its owner, U.S. Energy Corp., had been seeking a potential buyer.
Admiralty's shareholders acquired approximately 92 percent of Ruby's stock, while Admiralty becomes a wholly owned subsidiary. Company officials say that eventually Ruby Mining will be given a new name, with the most likely choice being Admiralty Corp.
"We had been searching for a company for months, and we looked at a number before we found Ruby Mining," Leeming said.
Murray Bradley, Admiralty's senior vice president and one of its founders, says the 12-year-old company has been funded up until now by private investors.
"We've raised about $8 million in capital from family and friends and angel investors. We had an additional $1.7 million [in debt] infused by an Austrian bank," he said.
The merger was completed just in time for Leeming and other company officials to fly to Jamaica for meetings with government officials and various archeological and environmental groups. Late this year they plan to make their first recovery operations of sunken treasure ships among the shallow reefs of the Pedro Banks, a nearly 2,000-square-mile atoll that may contain as many as 300 sunken ships. Admiralty is the first company in more than 16 years to gain an exclusive license to perform excavation work there.
Controversial industry
Advances in technology such as robotics, unmanned submarines and fiber optics are revolutionizing the treasure-hunting business, allowing salvors to reach wrecks at depths never possible before and those buried in sand and mud. But as a result, the business, already neither cheap nor easy, is becoming increasingly controversial among scientists and historians. Another Atlanta company, RMS Titanic Inc., has had to overcome court challenges and an international opposition in its quest to salvage the famed luxury liner.
Recent court rulings have blocked some salvors. According to the Reuters news service, delegates from about 100 nations are hammering out an agreement to block the commercial salvage of wrecks that are more than 100 years old. They have agreed to a framework but are still trying to resolve who has jurisdiction over wrecks on coastal nations' continental shelves and on the treatment of warships.
"We're familiar with the issues in the industry, not only domestically but abroad as well," Bradley said.
He said the company is trying to be sensitive to the concerns of archaeologists and others.
Leeming said Admiralty's technology has applications not only for undersea treasure hunting, but for mining and other mineral exploration ventures as well. For the time being, however, Admiralty plans to keep a firm hold on the technology for its own uses.
"The technology is proprietary," Leeming said. "We will apply it ourselves. We're not selling or leasing it. We will use the technology to do historical search and recovery of shipwrecks."
The device may also be used in a series of joint ventures with other companies that already hold licenses for shipwreck recovery from other nations.
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