Hecla Mining Company has just announced that it is sell its Venezuelan activities to Rusoro Mining Limited for $25 million, of which £20 million is in cash and remainder in shares of Rusoro common stock.

Company President and CEO, Phillips S. Baker, Jr., said that:

“The sale of our Venezuelan properties is part of our strategy to reduce the financing put in place to acquire Greens Creek. Prior to this transaction, Hecla repatriated approximately $39 million in cash that generated a $14 million foreign exchange loss. This transaction generates immediate cash from both the sale of the assets and the repatriation of $25 million of cash from our Venezuelan subsidiaries.”

“Our operations in Venezuela were very important to Hecla in the early 2000s, during a time when precious metals prices were depressed. But more recently that operation has become a much smaller proportion of our company’s value, as revenues from our U.S. silver properties grew. In fact, in 2007, the La Camorra unit contributed just 3% of our annual gross profit.”

Our initial reaction to this news is that it is a very good move and dramatically reduces Hecla’s exposure to political uncertainties that exist in Venezuela. The news comes after the close of business so we will have to wait until tomorrow to find out what the market makes of it.

We also draw your attention to this snippet:

“We will continue to consider gold properties in politically secure countries that leverage our expertise as an underground miner.”

Politically secure! Those words tell us everything.

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Hecla Mining Limited trades under the symbol of HL on the New York Stock Exchange.

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