[miningmx.com] — CONTROVERSIAL ANC Northern Cape chairperson John Block is a director of a company that for years has mined salt in the Kalahari with a fraudulent mining licence.
Last year the licence was the reason for a complicated court case between Saamwerk Soutwerke and SA Soutwerke, which culminated in the launching of a criminal investigation into forgery by the directorate of public prosecution in Kimberley.
Despite the criminal investigation, the same mining licence, licence MP169/2004, is now also being used by Block and his co-workers to contest the application for mining rights by a new applicant, Camel Rock Trading, in the Kalahari.
Block was in the Kimberley court during the past week on charges of tender fraud, and granted bail of R100 000.
The provincial office of the Northern Cape department of mineral resources in Kimberley – a party in the court case in which it was found that the mining licences had been falsified – after the court case gave Camel Rock instructions to consult Block and his co-workers, trading as SA Soutwerke, as SA Soutwerke was apparently an “affected party’.
This is the same office where an application by Kumba Iron Ore for mineral rights in the world-renowned Sishen Iron Ore Mine landed in the hands of Imperial Crown Trading 289 (ICT) last year.
ICT allegedly used Kumba’s documents to falsify its own documents, according to testimony that Kumba submitted to the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria in August this year.
On Friday Pieter Swart, provincial head of department in the Northern Cape, declined to offer any explanation.
The verdict in the SA Soutwerke case, which was delivered by Judge HJ Lacock on December 10 last year, caused great consternation in the Kimberley office of the department.
In it Judge Lacock found that the mining licence had been falsified, although from 2004 until earlier this year SA Soutwerke had been mining salt on portion 146 of section 58 of the farm Vrysoutpan on the strength of this licence.
