Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd. soared after the Sunday Times reported that its controlling shareholder Rio Tinto Group is preparing for a commodity price recovery by increasing its stake in the company.
Shares in the Vancouver-based company, whose Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine in Mongolia is more than doubling output, rose as much as 19 per cent on Monday, the biggest intraday gain since October 2011. The stock was up 12 per cent at 10:46 a.m.
The Sunday Times reported that Rio Tinto hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as part of a proposal to take Turquoise Hill private, without saying where it got the information. Under the plan, Rio Tinto would increase its 51 per cent stake slightly and hopes a single company or consortium would buy the rest, the newspaper reported on its website.
Both Rio Tinto and Turquoise Hill declined to comment on the story.
Turquoise Hill will begin work on an underground mine at Oyu Tolgoi later this year. The project would expand annual capacity to more than 500,000 metric tons of copper by 2027. Turquoise Hill owns 66 per cent of the deposit.
