An Ontario judge has made a decision that brings investors one step closer to getting $15.5 million from a junior mining company, a former executive and the executive's wife.

Judge John Brockenshire of Ontario Superior Court on Monday approved a settlement in a class action lawsuit against Southwestern Resources Corp. of Vancouver, one of three claims against the company for misrepresenting the amount of gold in drill samples taken from the Boka gold project in China.

Southwestern, and its former president and CEO John Paterson and Paterson's wife Margaret Joan Paterson, agreed in September to pay a total of $15.5 million to the plaintiffs in class action suits filed in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

The settlement, expected to cost the company $7 million to $7.5 million, still has to be approved by judges in British Columbia and Quebec.

Investors sued the company after it reported in July 2007 that the Boka results were wrong and later said it believed "manual and deliberate changes were made to its prior database to increase the grade of samples within mineralized sections."

It was trading for more than $6 a share before the results were revealed, but fell by more than half the day it disclosed the problem. It was under $1 within 10 weeks.

Southwestern sold the Boka project in May for $9.4 million US and a royalty if the project surpasses certain gold production levels.

The company has sued Paterson to recover damages and losses it claims he caused Southwestern.

The company, which has a mining project in Peru, now trades on the TSX for about 25 cents a share.

With files from the Canadian Press