TPT January 2008

From the AmericaS

the House Natural Resources Committee, declared on November 1, “The robbery of American gold and silver must stop”. The bill arouses a similar passion in opponents, who claim that the proposed royalties on mining operations would amount to a tax on an already struggling industry and would send mining jobs overseas. “This legislation hurts, perhaps even kills, the domestic mining industry and with it the towns and communities in western Nevada and rural America,” said Rep. Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, whose state is the fourth-highest gold producer in the world, after South Africa, Australia, and China. As with many other contentious issues before the US Congress these days, the proposed mining royalties were quickly suspected of posing a threat to national security. Opponents circulated a letter asserting that the bill could limit domestic availability of such minerals as magnesium, critical to the US military. The prospective rewrite of the hard-rock mining law would put new environmental controls on such mining, establish a cleanup fund for abandoned mines, and permanently ban cheap sales of public lands for mining. Coal mining and the oil and gas industries already pay royalties on materials extracted from public lands. The likelihood of passage of the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007, in the House and then the Senate, is perhaps not great. President George W Bush said he would veto the bill if and when it reaches his desk.

Of related interest . . . › Canada will now consider issues of national security before approving foreign takeovers of Canadian companies, Prime Minister Stephen J Harper said on October 4. The new scrutiny was prompted by the announced plan of a company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi to acquire PrimeWest Energy Trust, an oil and gas producer based in Calgary, Alberta, with properties in Western Canada and in the northwestern US states of Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota. An earlier plan – eventually abandoned – by a company controlled by the government of China to acquire a Canadian mine operator aroused strong resistance in Canada. The national security evaluation will not be required in takeovers that had already been announced.

The world’s largest gold miner offers a sporting proposition

Barrick Gold Corp, of Canada, will award $10 million to any scientist, researcher, or inventor (an all-inclusive category) who can increase the amount of silver the world’s largest pure gold mining company recovers from a mine in Argentina. Taking note of an “unusual approach to research and development” , Ian Austen of the New York Times wrote that the company’s decision to stake a prize for a new process grew out of its frustration at recovering only 6.7 per cent of the silver in the Veladero mine, compared to an 80 per

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J anuary 2008

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