Precious metals
An accredited refiner cannot buy what it cannot document.
Gold and silver doré, precious-metal concentrate and mine output, placed with refiners on the recognised lists. We are on the raw-material side of that gate — and the gate is not the assay.
The desk
Your counterparty is not a metals buyer. It is a compliance department.
Raw precious metal is sold to refiners. Everyone in the chain knows that. What sellers consistently misjudge is which part of the refiner decides, and on what.
A refinery's metallurgists are not the obstacle. Doré at 70 % gold with an awkward silver ratio and a copper problem is a Tuesday; the recovery is calculable and the charge is quotable. The obstacle is that every refiner on the LBMA Good Delivery List is bound by the Responsible Sourcing Programme to run documented due diligence on everything it takes in, to be audited on that annually by an independent third party, and to publish the result. A parcel that cannot be evidenced is not a parcel it can discount. It is a parcel that puts its listing at risk.
So the refiner's compliance desk holds the veto, and it exercises it before the assay lab ever sees the material. That single fact reorganises the whole trade: origin documentation is not paperwork that follows a deal, it is the thing being sold alongside the metal. We work on that side of it — assembling the file, matching material to a refiner that can actually take that origin, and saying no early where it cannot be done.
The material
Raw material into refiners. Not bullion out of them.
Worth stating at the top, because the two ends of this market use the same vocabulary and are not the same business. We sit upstream of the refinery, not downstream of it.
Gold and silver doré
Semi-refined bars poured at the mine or at a regional smelter, typically anywhere from the high tens of per cent gold upward, with silver and base metals making up the balance. Sold on outturn against the refiner's assay, not on the bar's stamped figure.
Precious-metal concentrate
Gravity and flotation concentrates carrying gold and silver, including copper concentrates where the precious metals are the payable of interest. Sold on dry weight with payable percentages and treatment and refining charges — see settlement.
Mine output under offtake
Defined tonnage over a period from a named operation, placed with a refiner that has cleared that origin. A known source lifted repeatedly is worth more to a refiner's compliance desk than a better assay from an unfamiliar one.
PGM-bearing material
Platinum group metal concentrates and intermediates where a refiner with the right circuit exists for them. A narrower market than gold and silver, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.
What we do not handle
Finished bullion. We do not sell Good Delivery bars, we do not operate or broker vault positions, and we do not deal in coins, jewellery or investment products. If you are buying refined metal, we are not your counterparty and will tell you so in the first reply.
And not scrap
Jewellery scrap, sweeps, catalyst and electronic recovery material are a real trade with a real refining market. It is not ours, and the origin questions on it are different enough that pretending otherwise would not serve you.
Accreditation
Why the standard at the far end of the chain constrains you at this end.
Good Delivery is an output specification. It is also, indirectly, the toughest input specification in the metals business — because a refiner keeps its listing only by controlling what it accepts.
The list is a threshold, not a register
Admission requires a rigorous technical assessment of assaying and production, plus minimum production volume and minimum tangible net worth. Refiners clear it; they do not simply join it.
It keeps being tested
Listed refiners sit under the LBMA's Proactive Monitoring Programme — periodic assay testing of production samples. A refiner can be, and has been, removed. Which is why accreditation is checked at the time of the trade rather than cited from a list somebody saw once.
And it reaches back to your parcel
Every Good Delivery refiner must comply with the Responsible Sourcing Programme: an annual independent third-party audit of its due diligence, and public reporting. Your material becomes part of what that audit examines. This is the mechanism that turns a compliance obligation at the refinery into a documentation requirement at the mine.
The output standard, in figures
Set out because it is what your material is destined to become, and because "LBMA bars" gets used loosely by people offering things that are not bars.
| Form | Weight | Minimum fineness | Required marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold — large bar | 350–430 fine troy ounces, gold content to the nearest 0.025 oz | 995.0 parts per thousand | Serial number, refiner's assay stamp, fineness to four significant figures, four-digit year of manufacture. Nominal 250 × 70 × 35 mm, 5–25° undercut. |
| Silver — large bar | 750–1,100 troy ounces, 900–1,050 preferred | 999.0 parts per thousand | Serial number, assay stamp, fineness to three significant figures, year. Nominal 300 × 130 × 80 mm, 5–15° undercut. |
| Platinum / palladium — plate or ingot | 1–6 kg (32.151–192.904 troy ounces) | 99.95 % | Serial number, refiner's stamp, fineness to four significant figures, metal designation, four-digit year and weight, on the larger face. |
Origin
Five steps, and they are the same five everywhere.
Mineral supply-chain due diligence has one internationally recognised framework. The refiner will be audited against it, so the file you hand over is built to it — and knowing its shape is what separates a due diligence file from a folder of scans.
| Step | What it requires | What a refiner sees when it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| 01 — Management systems | A published policy, an accountable person, internal controls, record-keeping and a grievance mechanism. | A one-page "compliance statement" with no named owner and no records behind it. |
| 02 — Identify and assess risk | Chain of custody mapped back through every intermediary to the mine or the recycling source, assessed against the risk annex. | The chain stops at a trading company. One question further back and the answer is that it is confidential. |
| 03 — Respond to identified risk | A risk-management plan reported to senior management, with measurable improvement and monitoring — or disengagement. | Risk acknowledged in general terms, with nothing following from it. |
| 04 — Independent third-party audit | An audit of the due diligence itself, by a party with no interest in the outcome. | An assay certificate offered as if it were an audit of the process. Different documents entirely. |
| 05 — Report annually | Public reporting on the supply chain and the due diligence performed. | Nothing public exists, and nothing ever has. |
The EU regime
Regulation (EU) 2017/821
The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation covers tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — the 3TG metals — explicitly including ores and concentrates as well as processed forms. It has been mandatory for EU importers since 1 January 2021 and makes the five OECD steps law rather than good practice. The Commission's own estimate is that it applies directly to between 600 and 1,000 EU importers and indirectly to around 500 smelters and refiners.
Its central concept is the conflict-affected and high-risk area: a region with high-demand mineral resources combined with armed conflict, post-conflict fragility, weak or absent governance, or systematic violations of international law. Two things about it are routinely got wrong, and both matter to a raw-material seller.
A CAHRA is not a published list of countries, so origin is assessed rather than looked up — which means a well-built file can carry a difficult origin and a thin one cannot carry an easy one. And material from a high-risk area is not prohibited: what is required is documented due diligence proportionate to the risk. Treating the regime as avoidance is how legitimate artisanal and small-scale production gets pushed further into the informal chain, which is the opposite of what it was written to do.
Silver and the platinum group metals sit outside 2017/821. They do not sit outside a refiner's Responsible Sourcing obligations, and we build the same file for them.
Settlement
You are not paid for the bar. You are paid for the outturn.
The commercial mechanics of raw material are unlike refined metal, and this is where inexperienced sellers lose money without anything going visibly wrong. There is no single market standard — particularly on gold concentrate — which is exactly why every term below has to be written out rather than assumed.
| Term | What it governs |
|---|---|
| Outturn | The refiner melts, samples and assays the lot, and settlement is calculated on that result. The figure stamped on a doré bar by the producer is a starting hypothesis, not a settlement basis. Provisional payment against a provisional assay, final settlement on outturn, is the normal shape. |
| Splitting limits | Your assay and the refiner's are exchanged, and if they agree within a published tolerance the result is split or the refiner's stands. Typical published limits are tight — on the order of 0.05 % for gold, 0.30 % for silver and 0.20 % for platinum and palladium. Outside the limit, either party may call an umpire. |
| Umpire assay | An independent laboratory from a list agreed in advance, whose result governs, with the cost usually falling on the party furthest from it. Agreeing the umpire list before shipment costs nothing; agreeing it during a dispute costs a great deal. |
| Payable percentage | You are paid for a stated proportion of contained metal, not all of it. On doré the payable is high and the deduction small; on concentrate it is materially lower and often carries a minimum deduction expressed in grammes per tonne, which bites hardest on low-grade material. |
| Refining charge | Per payable ounce, quoted separately for gold and for silver. This is the refiner's fee for the service and it is negotiable against volume, origin quality and how routine your material is to run. |
| Treatment charge | On concentrate, per dry metric tonne. Together with the payables and the refining charges it is what turns a headline grade into an actual net return, and the three have to be modelled together rather than compared one at a time. |
| Moisture and dry weight | Concentrate settles on dry metric tonnes. Moisture is weight you pay freight on and are not paid for, and the determination method belongs in the contract. |
| Penalty elements | Arsenic first, then antimony, mercury, lead, zinc and bismuth depending on the receiving circuit. Thresholds and rates are per contract. Arsenic is the one that can remove a destination entirely rather than merely cost you — Chinese import rules make heavily arsenical material non-deliverable or punitively taxed above certain levels, which is a market-access question, not a penalty question. |
| Pricing basis | Which benchmark, which of the day's auctions, and the quotational period. Gold prices off two daily LBMA auctions, silver off one, platinum and palladium off two — so "the LBMA price" is an unfinished term on three of the four metals. |
Permits & movement
Export permission and secure transit are conditions, not arrangements.
Raw precious metal is one of the few commodities where the physical movement is a regulated act in its own right, and where the wrong freight decision voids the cover on a very concentrated value.
- Export permits
- Most producing jurisdictions license the export of doré and precious-metal concentrate specifically, separately from ordinary customs clearance, and several require royalties or assays to be settled before a permit issues. A parcel offered for export without a permit already granted is not a parcel with a timing problem; it is a parcel that may never lawfully leave.
- Customs classification
- Doré and concentrate classify differently from refined metal, and the classification drives duty, VAT treatment and, in some jurisdictions, whether a shipment is permitted at all. It is established before shipping, not at the border.
- Secure movement
- By specialist valuables carriers, air freight under seal, with the value declared and cover placed for the actual amount. Ordinary freight forwarding and ordinary marine cargo cover do not work here, and a seller who proposes them is telling you they have not moved this material before.
- Seals and continuity
- Numbered seals applied at loading, recorded, and verified intact at the refinery in the presence of an independent party. Continuity of custody is what makes the outturn assay meaningful; without it the assay describes something that arrived, not necessarily what was sent.
- Who bears what
- The point at which risk and title pass, who insures which leg, and what happens on a seal discrepancy, all written down. On this material the gap between "we will sort it out" and a written term is the difference between a claim and a loss.
The answer is usually no
What arrives, and why it does not go anywhere.
Published because it is more useful than another paragraph about our commitment to integrity. These are the patterns we actually see on raw precious metal, and each ends the enquiry at the first reply. If you have been offered material and something feels thin, these are the questions to ask — with or without us.
The chain that stops one step back
Custody documented to an intermediary, with everything upstream described as commercially sensitive. Step 02 requires the chain to reach the mine. One missing link is the whole failure, and a refiner's auditor will find it in an afternoon.
Volumes with no producer behind them
Monthly tonnages exceeding the recorded output of the country of claimed origin. This is checkable against published production data faster than the offer can be read, and it remains the single quickest test of a raw-material approach.
No export permit, and no path to one
Material offered CIF from a jurisdiction that licenses doré exports, with no permit and no application. Sometimes this is inexperience. Often it is because the material is not the producer's to export.
Metal that cannot be seen
Vault photographs, safekeeping receipts from unknown custodians, sealed-box arrangements, and material that can only be verified after payment or after a visit at your cost. Real material in a real facility can be inspected and sampled by an independent party before anything moves.
Ground, not product
Mineral rights, in-ground resource, or a concession offered with the vocabulary of a cargo. A resource is not a shipment, and a shipment is what a refiner buys. These are two different conversations and only one of them is ours.
The instrument-shaped enquiry
Where the metal is incidental and the structure is the point — monetisation, collateral, proof of funds, or an instrument to be issued against a holding. We do not move material to enable a financial structure.
Scope
Where our obligation ends.
- What we do
- Place gold and silver doré, precious-metal concentrate and mine output with accredited refiners: matching material and origin to a refiner that can take it, assembling the due diligence file, agreeing settlement terms, and arranging inspection and secure movement.
- What we are not
- We are not a refiner, a producer or a financier, and we hold no equity in production. We do not sell refined bullion, operate vaults, or offer storage, custody or allocated accounts.
- What we will not participate in
- Monetisation, collateralisation, proof-of-funds arrangements, or any structure where the material exists to support an instrument. Also any transaction where the producer, the origin, the refiner or the beneficial owner cannot be named at the outset.
- Whose obligation the due diligence is
- The refiner's, under its own accreditation, and the importer's, under 2017/821 where it applies. We build and carry the file; we do not represent that our work discharges another party's legal obligation, and we will not sign a contract that says it does.
- Verification
- Sampling and assay by or under the supervision of an independent party, at a recognised facility, with retained samples. We do not offer our own assay as the governing figure, and we do not ask you to accept a counterparty's.
- Screening
- Per consignment, not once at onboarding. Producer, origin, intermediaries, refiner and beneficial ownership. A relationship that cleared last quarter is not a clearance for this parcel.
How to specify
Six lines, and the first two decide whether there is a conversation.
Answer 01 and 02 and we can usually tell you within a day whether we can act. Without them, detail in the other four changes nothing.
The producing operation, named
The mine or plant, its jurisdiction, its licence status and its actual recorded output. Named at the start, not after an NCNDA.
Chain of custody
Where the material is now, who holds it, and every intermediary between the operation and today. Including the ones that feel commercially sensitive.
Material and assay
Doré, concentrate or ore; the producer's assay with the method behind it; gold and silver grades, base metals, and the penalty elements — arsenic in particular.
Quantity and programme
Bar count and gross weight, or dry tonnes; one parcel or a defined tonnage over a period.
Export position
Whether an export permit is held, applied for, or not yet started, and what the jurisdiction requires before one issues.
Commercial expectation
The payable, refining and treatment terms you are working to, and the pricing benchmark and quotational period you expect.
Sampling & assay
On raw material, the sample is the whole argument.
Refined metal is homogeneous, so an assay of any part describes the whole. Doré and concentrate are not, and a bar poured without proper mixing can differ materially top to bottom. Almost every settlement dispute on raw precious metal is a sampling dispute wearing an assay's clothes.
- Doré — sampling at melt
- The lot is melted and homogenised, and samples are drawn from the molten metal — dip sampling into a mould is the standard method — because that is the only point at which the material is genuinely uniform. The sample is then divided: portions for the refiner, one for the seller's own independent assay, and one reserved and sealed for the umpire.
- Concentrate — sampling on the lot
- Mechanical or stopped-belt increment sampling to the applicable ISO procedure, with increment number and mass, division and preparation all recorded, and moisture determined on a separate sub-sample. Segregation in a stockpile is real, so the sampling plan is the document to argue about, not the certificate.
- Assay
- Fire assay for gold, still the reference method against which instrumental methods are calibrated. ICP-OES or ICP-MS for silver, platinum group metals and the full impurity profile. Method and laboratory named in the contract.
- The exchange
- Assays exchanged, compared against the agreed splitting limits, and referred to a pre-agreed umpire if they fall outside. Retained samples held sealed for the claim period by all parties.
- Weight and continuity
- Gross, tare and net on calibrated scales under supervision at both ends, seals recorded and verified intact, and the whole movement documented so that the outturn can be tied back to what was despatched.
- Documentation per lot
- Producer's assay and pour record, independent sampling and assay report, weight certificate, seal record, export permit, certificate of origin, the chain-of-custody file back to the operation, the receiving refiner's current accreditation status, and the counterparty screening record.
Straight answer
What we will tell you before you ask.
- That the refiner's compliance desk decides, not its metallurgists
- A difficult assay is a price. An undocumented origin is a refusal. If you only have budget to fix one thing before you offer material, fix the file.
- That the stamped figure on a doré bar is not what you get paid on
- Settlement is on the refiner's outturn after melt and homogenisation. Model the net-back from payables, refining and treatment charges — not the headline grade.
- That the umpire list belongs in the contract, before shipment
- Agreeing it in advance costs nothing. Agreeing it in the middle of a 0.05 % gold dispute costs a great deal, and by then neither side is neutral about laboratories.
- That high-risk origin is not the same as prohibited origin
- The framework asks for documented, proportionate due diligence, not blanket avoidance. We would rather do the work on a difficult origin than refuse a whole region and call that compliance.
- That we decline more here than anywhere else on our book
- By a wide margin, and almost always at the first reply. The enquiry flow in raw precious metal is genuinely poor, and where an origin or counterparty cannot be cleared it stops with us rather than being passed along — see Compliance.
Enquiries
Every enquiry is answered by the desk that handles it.
Send the product, quantity, delivery basis, destination and timing. We revert with availability, an indication and the documentation that accompanies it. Specifications are released once we know who we are speaking with.