TVX Gold Inc. -- new joint venture in Brazil.

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 1996--TVX Gold Inc. (TSE/NYSE/ME:TVX) ("TVX") announced Thursday that it has signed a letter of intent to form a joint venture with Battle Mountain Exploration Co. ("BMEC") to explore and develop TVX's Volta Grande gold property located in the state of Para, Brazil.

BMEC can acquire a 50 percent equity interest in the property in consideration of exploration expenditures totalling US$3.5 million until June 1, 1998 and property payments of US$890,000 over the same period.

The property, which comprises approximately 15,100 hectares, is located in the Amazon basin of Brazil approximately 460 kilometres southwest of the city of Belem, on the Xingu river. Gold occurrences in the area have been studied and developed by various mining companies from the 1950's up to today.

The Volta Grande project is located in the famous Carajas Mineral province, belonging to the Palmeiras Greenstone belt. The shear belt is eight kilometres wide and extends through the property for over 18 kilometres.

The joint venture area shows strong intrusive dioritic and tonalitic magmatic activity, associated with intense tectonic-hydrothermal phenomena and primary gold occurrences which have been the target of garimpeiro activity.

Preliminary exploration initiated by TVX outlined three major targets. These were defined by soil geochemical, auger, channel sampling and initial drilling and showed the following results:

1) A trend in the diorite domain (shear zone) has an extension of 2,500 metres by 100 metres wide, with gold values greater than 0.5 g/t in saprolite material which was confirmed by the first 1,000 metres of auger drill sampling. Channel sampling in saprolite gave the following gold values: 100 metres/0.53 g/t; 22 metres/1.23 g/t; 24 metres/1.47 g/t; 19 metres/0.78 g/t. Internal shear veins in the same trend indicate high gold grades suitable for underground mining; varying locally in thickness of 1.0 to 3.0 metres with gold values of 12.0 g/t to three to four ounces per tonne.

2) A greenstone sequence with a soil geochemical gold and copper anomaly of three kilometres and hosted in metabasalt. Another anomaly of one kilometre length shows more than 100 ppb of gold with channel samples over a 20.0 metres thick sequence averaging 1.28 g/t.

3) A tonalite sequence with multiple shear-related quartz veins. The first three exploratory holes, intercepted 0.65 metres with 13.45 g/t gold; 1.14 metres with 7.99 g/t gold and 2.5 metres with 1.46 g/t gold.

As part of the 1996 exploration program, the joint venture will continue with auger drilling on the open-pit targets (saprolite) and with a diamond drilling program of 3,800 metres to define the open pit and underground targets.

CONTACT: TVX Gold Inc., Toronto

Ed Baer, 416/941-0119