The junior's stock started trading steady at the raising price, 20c, briefly ticking up to 23c after around 2.4 million shares changed hands.

 

Bastian's shares closed at 21c, capitalising it at $15 million.

 

Around 43.4% of the company is owned by the top 20 shareholders, with the board team of Ralph Stagg, Ross Landles, David Nolan, and Sam El-Rahim owning almost 20%.

 

The company, known as Comet Exploration for most of the past decade, went to IPO to raise funds to ramp up the search for precious and base metal projects in Chile's mineral-rich Coastal Cordillera region, which is host to the world-class Maricunga Belt.

 

The immediate priority is Capote, where $1.6 million of expenditure is planned over the next two years, where areas of strong alteration have been defined from mapping, in an area surrounding 

the historical San Juan gold mine, which had a reported head grade of 40 grams per tonne, but mining ceased in the 1950s. 

 

Exploration work at Capote has been limited to basic rock-chip sampling and geological mapping, but the company believes there is the potential for a thick vein-hosted gold system with other associated metals, potentially an overlying an iron-oxide copper gold system.

 

Its other projects are the Garin silver-gold play and the Cometa copper project.

 

All three areas, which cover 126sq.km, are covered by granted mining leases.

 

Bastion plans modern geophysical and geochemical techniques, including an airborne magnetic and radiometric survey with the hope of finding high-grade, low tonnage gold deposits within its leases.