Ellatzite Med AD (Bulgaria)

Elatsite Med AD is a private firm and its main activity is extraction and processing of copper and gold-containing ores. It has two production units - an open-pit mine located in the town of Etropole and a flotation plant near the village of Mirkovo.
Bulgaria's open copper pit Elatsite Med, which was opened in 1983, is located near the village of Mirkovo east of Sofia. In August 1999, Bulgaria's Privatisation Agency sold a 79% stake of the copper pit to a management-employee buyout company for EUR 5.1 million. In July 2000, the sell-off agency sold another 17.98% in the copper pit to local company Retel OOD for EUR 768,800. In June 2004, the owners of the mine said they would invest EUR 40 million in a 10-year period to upgrade the mine and boost its copper ore output.
In June 2007, Elatsite Med won a licence for search of gold, silver and copper deposits on an area of around 15,000 square metres near the town of Etropole in the region of Elatsite-Perana in the central parts of the Balkan Mountain. The company said it would invest USD 426,000 in search activities regulated under the three-year licence. In November 2012 the government awarded Elatsite Med with a 10-year extension of the copper and gold-containing ores mining permit.