[miningmx.com] – A FORMER deputy director-general of the mineral resources department (DMR), Jacinto Rocha, told BDLive that the department did not force Gold Fields into a specific empowerment deal on its South Deep mine as suggested by Mamphela Ramphele, the former chairperson of the gold company.
“As a department we did nothing wrong. We didn’t tell Nick Holland [Gold Fields CEO] to bring Gayton McKenzie to act as a consultant,” Rocha told the publication.
“Apart from informing Gold Fields that the “once empowered, always empowered’ principle didn’t exist and that they needed to do another empowerment deal, we never dictated to them on the nature of the deal and who to include,’ he said.
Gold Fields is currently the subject of an inquiry by the US’s Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) into an empowerment deal with Invictus Gold which consists of a number of political figures.
In March Ramphele told BDLive said: “The South African government had shoved the list of some of Invictus Gold’s black economic empowerment shareholders down Gold Fields’ throat, with an ultimatum that if the preferred names were not taken on board it would be denied a mining licence”.
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