KINROSS is the latest company to be handed a setback by an African country seeking greater economic participation after Mauritania rejected a permit application for the firm’s Tasiast expansion, said Bloomberg News in an article earlier this week.
The Mauritanian government has requested discussions about “… all of the company’s activities in Mauritania” with the aim of creating greater overall economic benefits for the nation, said Bloomberg News citing the company in its first quarter market update.
The first phase of the Tasiast project is expected to yield 800,000 ounces of gold a year, but with the second phase, Mauritania is forecast to provide roughly a third of all Kinross gold production annually. “Kinross is currently assessing the situation, including the potential impact of the request on the Phase Two expansion,” it said.
“It is very early days and I don’t want to speculate on outcomes in Mauritania, or hypotheticals regarding Ghana,” Louie Diaz, a spokesman for Kinross, told Bloomberg, referring to similar calls for greater economic participation by the Ghanaian government.
In addition to Mauritania and Ghana, the governments of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have called for improved economic benefits as a result of foreign investment. In the case of the DRC, it has re-written its Mining Code, ignoring the stabilisation agreement in the previous 2002 code.
