Sammy_da_Smile
Regular
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AVZ Discussion 2022
- Thread starter GazDix
- Start date
Frank
Top 20
10pm here so 2 hrs to go ,, fuck i'm still awakeHappy New Year !!! you good people.
And never forget John25, stay united, stay strong.
Xerof
Biding my Time 1971
7pm here and I’m already fucked10pm here so 2 hrs to go ,, fuck i'm still awake
Celebrated with family members in NZ 4 hours ago, Adelaide 1/2 hour ago, still got Perth in the wings, then bloody Dubes
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Mute22
Regular
Claim your 2025 bragging rights now make your predictions today to secure eternal 'I told you so's!'
What’s your take? Will we push forward with the ICC and ICSID cases, or does securing Locke’s funding give us enough leverage to reach a resolution sooner?
My call is we will be sitting on our hands still 01/01/2026 as dirty tactics continue to delay our cases.
What’s your take? Will we push forward with the ICC and ICSID cases, or does securing Locke’s funding give us enough leverage to reach a resolution sooner?
My call is we will be sitting on our hands still 01/01/2026 as dirty tactics continue to delay our cases.
Same as last year and the year before.
Frank
Top 20
New year’s resolutions for miners – 2025
The end of the year is, as they say, a time for reflection.Each year for this column, I dust off last year’s and see what resolutions I proposed for mining companies.
Notably, I get it wrong in my assessment of sovereign risk and I think 2024 was no different.
An optimist by nature, I tend to think the trajectory of sovereign conduct towards foreign investors arcs towards reasonableness.
And whilst jurisdictions like Mozambique and Zambia have demonstrated prudence in dealing with their foreign partners, my optimism was once again misplaced in 2024.
With the emergence of Coup Belt States thumbing their noses at the Western-led international order and cozying up to Russian and Chinese interests, the risks for foreign mining companies in Africa remain high.
Meanwhile, the resource nationalist project commenced by Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico shows no signs of abating under his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Hopefully, my misplaced optimism for 2024 will yield some lessons for 2025, so with that, I give you my New Year’s Resolutions for Mining Companies, 2025 Edition:
Resolve to send the lawyers
When African States demand in-person meetings with company representatives to discuss alleged outstanding tax payments or other unsubstantiated penalties or fines, do not send company executives to attend those meetings.Local executives and lawyers will suffice.
There is an unwritten rule that States should not lock up the lawyers. I seem to test that proposition routinely, but so far it has held true.
Resolve to maintain licenses in good standing
No matter how good your lawyer is, if you have failed to meet bona fide statutory conditions for maintaining your permit in good standing, they will not be able to obtain sizeable damages from a State that lawfully terminated your concession.Resolve to recognize that resource nationalism isn’t going away
Whether it’s Mexico or Burkina Faso, sovereigns continue to misguidedly pronounce that their own national companies are better equipped to mine the national resource endowment than pesky foreigners who spent years identifying, exploring and developing an asset.You may have heard them say that this time it’s different, that you’re special, but it’s not different and you’re not special. From junior to major, all companies face the scourge of resource nationalism.
So what to do?
Well every year I advise to structure your investments in risky States to ensure recourse to international arbitration in the event of a dispute with the State. But what I also need to tell you is to keep “the receipts”.
Take a contemporaneous minute of every meeting with government officials, even if they don’t agree to a final version.
Record conversations if legal to do so (depending on the laws of the jurisdiction).
Catalogue all correspondence and emails. Paper everything over.
And by all means, don’t say anything in a letter or an email that you wouldn’t want an arbitration tribunal seeing later.
Resolve to hire lawyers who can win
You wouldn’t hire a consultancy to produce an NI43-101 who hadn’t done so before, so don’t hire lawyers to negotiate with or bring an arbitration claim against a sovereign who haven’t won a case before.Arbitration lawyers love to talk about arbitration, but that’s a far cry from bringing a case to hearing, obtaining a favourable award and monetising that award. Sovereigns know which lawyers to fear, so stick with the winners.
Timothy Foden is partner and co-head of the arbitration group at Boies Schiller Flexner, representing mining companies in disputes with sovereign nations. In 2023 he was named as a “global elite thought leader” in the Future Leaders of Arbitration.
mining.com
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Hodlandwin69
Regular
Mihigo hung out with Felix yesterday
Frank
Top 20
China's control of the value chain of raw materials from Congolese mines worries Europe
Europe's raw material needs have put the DRC in a better negotiating position.But while Brussels wants secure supplies, the realities on the ground are quite different.
Brussels, summer 2024.
In a Bureau of the European Parliament, French MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne of the Liberal parliamentary group Renew Europe sets out her position on European raw materials policy.
"France, Germany and all the Member States of the European Union must act together with the logic of creating secure and sustainable supplies", explains the MEP.
In her view, extraction methods must respond to Europe's vision and ambitions, 'i.e. not plundering resources and ensuring that children do not work in abominable conditions'.
7,000 kilometers further south, near the mining town of Kolwezi in the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Banze works in a copper and cobalt mine. Baseball cap screwed onto the head to protect itself from the scorching sun, it holds two pieces of ore in its hand.
Here, the work is done by hand, and the 50 kg bags are carried on the back. The DW team does not see any children on the site.
"The work of this copper, we, the miners, do not know what it is for. It's the whites who buy it. We sell it, but we don't know what they're doing with it,' the miner testifies.
The leading RDC in cobalt production
A whole world separates the reliefs covered with red dust from Congolese mining sites and the air-conditioned corridors of the political heart of Europe... The bridge that connects these two universes is raw materials.
Cobalt, which is a component of electric batteries, is an essential material for the energy transition that Europe has made its battle horse, with the promise of achieving climate neutrality by 2050.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces two thirds of this ore, so the level of world cobalt production depends largely on the country. After a low of 800 tons in 1994, the volume increased more than a hundredfold to 98,000 tons in 2020, while yield in the rest of the world only doubled.
Europe is asking, the Congo offers - an equation that seems simple at first glance.
Except that this is not the case, as Cecilia Trasi, an energy and climate analyst in the European think tank Bruegel explains: "The majority of world cobalt is in Congo, but three-quarters are dealt with in China, which means that to use cobalt, you have to go to China, which, as things stand, can be a problem."
China controls the raw materials value chain
MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne is aware of the problem and once again advocates joint action by Europeans.
"We have a European interest in acting together", insists the MEP, "because the country that has mastered the entire value chain of raw materials, extraction, processing, industrialisation, recycling, so far, is China."
She denounced "the often methods of predation, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or in other States" as well as "the desire not to transform value and create value locally in Africa, when it must be an issue that we must share with Africans."
Thus, European actors are barely appearing in the Congo's copper belt.
Instead, cobalt arrives in Europe through the global market, after being refined in China and five or six intermediate steps, according to Cecilia Trasi estimates.
For Simon Tuma Waku, it makes perfect sense that European countries are not the DRC’s partners of choice.
The former Minister of Mines, who introduced the country's first mining code in 2002, after years of war, compared the relationship between African countries and former colonial powers with young adults who wanted to emancipate themselves from their parents.
"This is what is happening today: all African countries say, yes, we have been colonized. Now you have to take into account our feelings, our desires. Bring money or something, but don't impose on us what you think is good for us.
Ask us: What do you want to do? And we'll tell you what to do with money."
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is aware of its value
The attention paid to the raw materials of the Congo is not new. More than a hundred years ago, slaves exploited rubber for European needs in the private colony of Leopold, King of the Belgians, in inhumane conditions.
After independence, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko established a system in which nationalization, lack of investment, and runaway nepotism left little room for profit.
As a result, production has fallen.
It was only under Joseph Kabila, the predecessor of current President Felix Tshisekedi, that efforts were made to regulate the sector, attract important companies and even cooperate with the country – with the aim of embarking on battery production in turn.
Asked on the sidelines of a mining fair in Lubumbashi, former Mining Minister Simon Tuma Waku welcomes this development:
Business is thriving - Chinese companies and buyers are the first beneficiaries
"We took a crucial decision by opening the mining sector to private investors, because it was collapsing and the state could not generate significant revenues from the mining sector."
Now a businessman, Simon Tuma Waku is proud to see that his 2002 mining code marked the starting point for the recovery of the sector.
In the meantime, a new version of the mining code entered into force in 2018. It focuses on the environmental compatibility of the mining sector.
Difficult counter-offensive of Europe against China
If you look closely, you can find traces of European intervention in the Congo.
The Lobito corridor, a major infrastructure project, is to connect the city of Kolwezi with Angola, new roads and power lines are being built.
It must make it easier to link the DRC to the Atlantic Ocean and thus to Europe - one more part of autonomy for the Congo.
Since Brussels, Jutta Urpiliainen has been very active in the EU-Africa relationship.
"The world we live in is very interdependent. Thus, what is happening in Africa also has an impact on our lives in Europe", stresses the European Commissioner for International Partnerships.
She felt that Europe was geopolitically isolated. With the Global Gateway Initiative, a European counter-initiative on the New Silk Road, the EU and its partners have, however, been successful.
The "Team Europe" invests mainly in strategic projects such as the Lobito corridor.
'It is important to invest in development cooperation and in international partnerships,' says Europe, who wants Europe to be a champion of climate finance, human development and global investment.
So we are not turning our backs on Africa or the rest of the world, while investing a lot in our own continent and its security."
Cobalt remains a product in high demand, regardless of working conditions and environmental consequences
Despite all its efforts, the EU cannot become the number one partner of the Democratic Republic of Congo. China is cutting its share of the lion, other countries are positioning themselves...
And the powerful of the provinces and big business are far from playing according to the rules of the former colonial powers.
The progress of the new mining code is currently only on paper: according to local NGOs, the government does not seem to be in a hurry to enforce its own law...
mediacongo
Mute22
Regular
We really were always in a lose-lose situation:
1) Pay the bribes, be blackmailed and have license revoked when refusing to pony up for the inevitable increasing extortion.
2) Don't pay bribes, officials see themselves as entitled to skim off the top and would rather make life hell for tens of thousands of people just to keep the status quo of their corruption.
Game was rigged from the start.
1) Pay the bribes, be blackmailed and have license revoked when refusing to pony up for the inevitable increasing extortion.
2) Don't pay bribes, officials see themselves as entitled to skim off the top and would rather make life hell for tens of thousands of people just to keep the status quo of their corruption.
Game was rigged from the start.
Remark
Top 20
200 by 400 meters clearly wasn't large enough, fucking amateurs!
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