TORONTO – Gold miner Minera IRL has removed co-founder Diego Benavides from his position as interim CEO after five months on the job.

The change came less than two weeks after residents near the company’s flagship gold project in Ollachea, Peru, withdrew their support for the project.

Minera IRL (TSX:IRL) also said on Monday that it is investigating unspecified allegations of impropriety originating from the company’s whistleblower hotline.

In an interview, Minera IRL executive chairman Daryl Hodges refused to elaborate on the reasons for Benavides’ ouster. He also declined to comment on the specifics of the allegations.

Benavides could not be reached for comment.

In a letter to the company on Aug. 14, the Ollachea community president called for Hodges to step down and turn power over to Benavides, a Peruvian and an honorary citizen of the town for his work developing the Ollachea gold project over the past eight years.

Hodges, a Canadian, said it’s not clear what precipitated the community’s withdrawal of support for the gold project. He spoke to an Ollachea community meeting in July, he said, and received several questions about why Benavides hadn’t taken over the company after executive chairman and co-founder Courtney Chamberlain stepped down in March.

“It’s a bit confusing that if there’s a great relationship with a community for eight or 10 years and a new guy comes up and talks for basically 10 minutes, most of which is translated, that there would be such a monumental uprising,” Hodges said.

While Benavides worked with Chamberlain to found Minera IRL, Hodges joined the company as a director in February 2014. After Chamberlain stepped down, Hodges took his place as the final decision-maker.

In June, the company announced it had raised US$70 million from the state-owned Peruvian development bank along with an option for a further US$240 million in debt financing to build infrastructure and begin production at the Ollachea gold mine.

Now Minera IRL says funding may be at risk. The company announced on Aug. 17 that it is postponing the project because of the withdrawal of support from the community.

The company had originally planned to open the mine in the second half of 2017 and initially produce 100,000 ounces of gold per year.

Hodges said he is confident the Ollachea project will still get done.

“I think that cooler heads should prevail here and that we can get back to talking to people once all of this background noise is extinguished and the emotions die down,” he said.

Minera IRL is set to have a special shareholders’ meeting to discuss the changes at its annual general meeting on Thursday.