NGOs from Australia, Canada and India call for an international moratorium on deep seabed mining in light of the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) issuing of 7 exploration licences for deep seabed mining in international waters. Among companies involved in deep sea mining are Nautilus Minerals (in which Anglo American is a major shareholder), London-listed Neptune Minerals and UK Seabed Resources, controlled by Lockheed Martin UK.
Even before African Minerals was admitted to the London Stock Exchange in August 2007, its founder, Frank Timis was cooking the books. Earlier this month, the rough and ready Romanian was once again up to his tricks – after cancelling a supply agreement with GIO Cyrpus, without the agreement of his own board.
For Colombia’s northernmost province of La Guajira, August 7 was noteworthy — and not only for the first drops of rain that fell in over seven months. It also marked the beginning of a regional forum on the effects of coal mining by Cerrejón, the company behind Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine.
As the Mining Bill is debated before Bougainville’s parliament, which will deliver up Panguna to Rio Tinto, and potentially turn the rest of Bougainville into an industrial wasteland, the Bill’s mastermind and principal author, AusAID pundit and chief Rio Tinto apologist Anthony Regan, has declared all opposition to mining an ‘outsider’ plot – quite the irony given Regan, and his Australian troupe, i.e. outsiders, currently stand accused of hoisting a neo-colonial piece of legislation on Bougainville, i.e a plot.
The legislation is again a blue print for large-scale foreign-owned mining across the island, previously devastated by a civil war sparked by Rio Tinto’s operations at Panguna.
