Outgoing finance chief Lei Wang will remain with the company in an advisory capacity.

June 26, 2026

Lion Copper & Gold Corp. has appointed Maria Milagros Paredes as chief financial officer and corporate secretary, effective immediately as of June 22. The Yerington, Nevada-based developer is casting the move as a strengthening of its financial leadership as it pushes its flagship copper project forward.

Paredes, who goes by Millie, takes over from Lei Wang, who is transitioning to an advisory role rather than departing outright — a continuity arrangement that points to an orderly handover at the finance function.

A technical and financial profile

The incoming CFO brings more than three decades of international experience across the mining and finance worlds, a profile that spans both the technical and capital-markets sides of resource development. Most recently she served as CFO and corporate secretary of Mako Mining Corp., where she helped steer the company through its transition into commercial production while tightening governance, financial controls, reporting, and budgeting. Earlier she was CFO of Bellhaven Copper & Gold, leading financing, joint-venture and merger work alongside investor relations and asset-level economic evaluations.

Her background reaches beyond the finance chair. Paredes has held senior finance and strategy roles at Rio Tinto’s U.S. Borax operations, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Q² Lab Solutions, a Quest Diagnostics–IQVIA joint venture. Early in her career she worked in technical and management positions at Compañía Minera Antamina and BHP Tintaya, focused on:

• ore reserve estimation
• mine planning
• geological modeling
• project evaluation

She holds an MBA from Cornell, a master’s in economic geology from Iowa State, and a bachelor’s in geological engineering from Peru’s Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, and is fluent in English and Spanish.

Leadership framing

Chief executive John Banning framed the appointment around the combination of public-company financial leadership and hands-on mineral-project understanding that Paredes offers, pointing to her experience across resource evaluation, mine planning, production, capital markets, uplisting, and major transactions as Lion advances Yerington and weighs future strategic options. He also credited Wang for her work supporting the company’s financial reporting, governance, compliance, and capital-markets activities during a formative phase.

Lion is advancing the Yerington copper project through an earn-in agreement with Nuton LLC, a Rio Tinto venture.