Zijin is fucking rich and doesn't need to raise money.
Who's going to fund us without ML?
AVZ Discussion 2022
- Thread starter GazDix
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Who's going to fund us without ML?
Samus
Top 20
If Zijin is there setting up before us along with the Hydro then we're fucked. Imo we have to either force those cunts to pay something like fair value for the entire deposit by tying them up in a legal quagmire. Or simply sue the fuck out if DRC, take their gold bullion reserves and a cut of everything official that's transacted in $USD over the next decade.
BRICK
Regular
This article is the great. ASPI is the leading think tank that writes on defence and strategic issues. The readership is the important part. Politicians, defence industry + foreign affairs and academia.China’s control and coercion in critical minerals
7 Jun 2024|Ian Satchwell
This is the first of two parts of an article on coercive threats to critical minerals supply and what Australia and its critical minerals partners are doing and should do to counter them.
Markets for critical minerals are no longer shaping up to be the next components of the global economy to be dominated by China. They already are.
While Western nations were sleeping, China built vertically integrated supply chains for several critical minerals vital to the energy transition and high technology applications, including defence equipment.
Critical mineral supply chains are increasingly subject to Chinese government manipulation focussed on creating and maintaining monopolies and monopsonies. The scale and scope of this competition is presenting Australia and its partners with significant economic and security challenges. The Australian government’s 2 June divestment order to China-linked entities with shareholdings in rare earths developer Northern Minerals is an example of what will be needed to counter China’s domination of critical minerals supply.
Stricter foreign investment oversight may mitigate some of the more egregious attempts to grab control of minerals projects in Australia. Meanwhile, various coercive behaviours are directly affecting Australian mining interests at home and abroad and threatening growth of more diverse, secure and sustainable critical mineral supply chains. Several recent developments have highlighted the growing intensity of these threats.
The situation is becoming acute in several countries in resource-rich Africa, where Australian companies contributed 29 percent of the continent’s exploration spending for all minerals in 2023. (Canadian companies contributed another 29 percent.) Russia-influenced deterioration of security in several mineral-rich African nations is supporting China’s aspirations.
Two Australian companies, operators of world-scale lithium properties that are being developed into mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mali, have been edged out by China-based joint-venture partners amid disputes with national governments, plummeting share prices and suspensions from the ASX. Control of the resources will consolidate China’s role as effectively the world’s central banker for lithium: it already controls around 80 percent of processing and an increasing share of global mine production.
The DRC property is the Manono Project, which has the largest hard-rock lithium resource in the world. A dispute with China’s Zijin Mining Group over the project’s ownership has resulted in Australia’s AVZ Minerals being delisted from the Australian Stock Exchange. AVZ said in September it believed China and Congolese companies, including state-owned Cominiere, were ‘acting in concert to crystalise disputes with AVZ and disrupt and delay the development of the Manono Project with the aim of seizing control’. The International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes made orders in AVZ’s favour in January, but the company says the DRC government has failed to comply with them.
In the situation in Mali, Australian company Leo Lithium Ltd agreed in May to sell its stake in the large-scale Goulamina lithium project under development there to China’s Ganfeng Lithium, relinquishing project management. That followed a dispute with the government of Mali and its September 2023 suspension from the ASX. Leo Lithium’s shares were valued at 51 cents at the time of suspension, down from a high as $1.25 in mid-2023, shortly before the dispute emerged. Ganfeng Lithium paid Leo Lithium the equivalent of 43 cents a share. Leo Lithium said the sale was in the best interests of its shareholders in light of ‘challenging’ sovereign and security risks in Mali.
Australia, through its mining companies, has been the largest foreign investor in Mali and neighbouring Burkina Faso. Russian influence in recent years has worsened Mali’s longstanding political instability and driven further deterioration in security for the population and businesses there. Security of mines in West Africa, which the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has sought to support through its annual mine security conference there, has become ugly.
On 30 May, the US government sanctioned companies linked with the Kremlin-controlled Wagner Group operating in Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), saying ‘Wagner Group personnel have engaged in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and other brutalities against innocents in the CAR and Mali.’ The Wagner Group has taken over several of Mali’s gold mines and allegedly is producing gold to fund the Russian regime.
Market manipulation is another method of coercion. China’s supply chain dominance for several critical minerals gives it the market power to crush competition, as industry leader Angus Barker points out.
China’s investment in low-cost but environmentally harmful nickel laterite mining and smelting in Indonesia has delivered cheap nickel for batteries and stainless steel made in China. This has driven down global nickel prices, threatening the viability of higher-cost but more socially and environmentally responsible nickel production. China’s investment in new lithium mining capacity in Africa and Australia and its domination of processing could distort the market for that battery mineral.
China-linked supply also dominates markets for several other minerals and metals, including rare earths needed for both the global energy transition and defence equipment. Australia’s Iluka Resources highlighted the situation at its recent annual general meeting, with managing director Tom O’Leary saying, ‘There are clear, ongoing efforts, including by Chinese state-owned entities, to extend their nation’s monopoly by controlling Australia’s rare earth deposits.’
China has used its virtual monopoly in rare earths to apply geopolitical coercion. In 2010 it withheld rare earths supply to Japan amid a territorial dispute. This helped to trigger Japanese investment in the Weld Range rare earths project of Lynas Rare Earths in Western Australia.
Recent Australian government crackdowns have targeted the use of some coercive actions. In 2023 the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) rejected a bid by the Chinese company Yuxiao Fund for a higher stake in the Browns Range project in Kimberley, Western Australia, of ASX-listed Northern Minerals. In early June the government sanctioned associates of Yuxiao Fund after discovering they had tried to circumvent FIRB rules in taking up further shares. Just before this order to dispose of shareholdings, Yuxiao Fund had successfully petitioned for removal of Northern Minerals’ executive chairman after he reported the share buying by Yuxiao Fund’s associates.
It has now emerged that Northern Minerals suffered a malign cyber security breach and data theft in March. Coincidence? Possibly. But why was this particular small mining company targeted?
One explanation is that the output of heavy rare earths from Browns Range will be processed at the under-construction Eneabba rare earths refinery operated by Iluka Resources, also a heavy rare earths producer. This will be the only non-China production of this scarce product used in high performance permanent magnets essential to components of defence equipment such as guidance systems.
Rare earths mining and processing proposals in the United States, including the Lynas Rare Earths processing plant in Texas, have been subjected to fake social media attacks in recent years, seemingly designed to stir up local opposition.
Supply chain allies, including Australia, the United States, Britain, the European Union and Canada have taken some steps to counter coercion, but as part two of this article will explain, more concerted action is needed to assure more diverse and secure minerals supply.
China’s control and coercion in critical minerals | The Strategist
This is the first of two parts of an article on coercive threats to critical minerals supply and what Australia and its critical minerals partners are doing and should do to counter them. Markets ...www.aspistrategist.org.au
The author is in the perfect position to shine more of a light on Manono. He often writes about critical minerals and China and recently released a report about it. I wonder if that report mentions AVZ.
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/reclaiming-leadership-australia-and-global-critical-minerals-race
We already are tying everyone up in a legal quagmire. Only problem being that its just being ignored by the DRC, Zijin and Cominiere
Samus
Top 20
Hopefully it just means that ultimately they'll have to pay the price one way or another.
Yes, while that's true as it currently stands, neither the DRC (and Cominiere) nor Zijin will be able to ignore the final ICC and ICSID decisions. In conjunction with the final decisions will come enforceable compensation, penalties and interest.
However, I think the corrupt pricks will simply delay and ignore interim orders until the 59th minute in the forlorn hope AVZ runs out of funds, and then make an offer to get us out of the room.
There is no white knight waiting to swoop in to save our butts. Zijin will eventually get the entire tenement; it's just a matter of time and price.
Jus' say'n
Cheers
F
Azzler
Top 20
Do you have inner knowledge to say there's no one on our side?
What info do you have to claim Zijin will get the entire thing and that no one is on AVZ's side?
After two years, who has stepped up?
You can be on a side but to have the actual pull to turn everything in AvZs favour, who exactly are you expecting?
The legals hurdles all need to come though first.
Samus
Top 20
That's right, unfortunately the West is like a fucking circus at the moment. It's hard to fathom we might count on anybody for anything.
And don't get me started on the current federal government, which seems perennially (or maybe peri-anally) preoccupied with other issues.
A year on and I'm still waiting for my response from the Hon Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Azzler
Top 20
Yes but you make the statement like it's fact and not opinion.
If you're commenting from the sidelines without diving deeper to find out as much as you can what's going on, it's completely ignorant.
I don't mean to cause offence but why make these observations when you wouldn't have a clue what's going on in the background. It's completely ignorant conclusions.
I very much disagree with the conclusions you're making.
Hemicuda
Regular
Well enlighten us azz?
Azzler
Top 20
Surely you can imagine that unless you're in the trenches, you would be completely unaware of any western involvement or influence?
The herald sun doesn't have a monopoly on all the goings on in the world.
The show ain't over yet, I'm just saying if you don't know, why draw such conclusions?
Azzler
Top 20
Get involved, spend time talking to people in private, investigate.
So much at present is confidential and very secretive, but if you care enough to research you can get a bit of an idea of the undisclosed manouvers taking place.
No one is going to announce it on a public forum.
Beat me to it ,
Question , as I see it there is no law on somebody saying something about a company's, activities , company announcements etc on a delisted company so I would think if anything was going on in the background we might have heard something by now once a 2nd person knows it no longer a secret , not even word on funding , just saying
Azzler
Top 20
Are you saying that once a company is delisted, it becomes impossible to keep any of their operations a secret?
That because you haven't heard of something happening, it means there must not be anything happening?
Just trying to get straight what you're saying.
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