A team of former Integra Gold Corp. executives has taken over leadership of Mag Copper Limited and renamed the Canadian company Integra Resources Corp., the company announced on August 17.

The $590-million purchase of Quebec miner Integra Gold by Eldorado Gold closed in July; one month later George Salamis, Integra Gold’s former executive chairman, has become Integra Resources’ president, CEO and director. The new management team also includes former Integra Gold executives Stephen de Jong, who will be chairman and director, and Andrée St-Germain, who will be CFO and corporate secretary of Integra Resources.

After announcing Integra Gold’s sale in April, the executives were offered various positions, “but instead of jumping at those offers, we thought, this is a group that works extremely well together, we do a lot of things the right way, from thinking outside of the box to capital market experience and with our Disrupt Mining efforts, so we decided to stay together,” Salamis told CIM Magazine. “It’s allowed us to continue on from where we left off.”

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Salamis plans to re-focus and re-brand the company, emphasizing a concentration on precious metals development in the Americas. “The focus is on going back to what Integra [Gold] did best, which is take assets that are moderately advanced, grow them, de-risk them, and take them to the [preliminary economic assessment] stage relatively quickly. With Integra [Gold] we started off with a market cap at $25 million and over the course of four years we turned that into a $600-million valuation,” said Salamis.

Mag Copper was a shell corporation with no assets, which is exactly what the former Integra Gold executives were looking for. Because Mag Copper did not have many outstanding shares or a broad distribution of stock, it was simple for the group to take it over, explained Salamis.

Integra Resources is a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange, but once the company acquires assets, it will move onto the Toronto Stock Exchange. Salamis said the company has already been looking at projects and hopes to make its first acquisition in the next one to three months.