[Ferro-Alloys.com]AQUILA Resources, a subsidiary of China’s state-owned Baosteel, has turned to the courts to win back a manganese project and resolve a dispute with the Department of Mineral Resources regarding overlapping rights.

 

Aquila had hoped to resolve the impasse in talks between its local subsidiary, the department and Pan African Mineral and Development Company (PAMDC), which is owned by the governments of Zambia, Zimbabwe and SA.

 

The dispute relates to the Gravenhage manganese deposit on the Avontuur property in the Northern Cape. The talks were fruitless.

 

Aquila said on Tuesday it had started legal proceedings against Mineral Resources Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi to protect its “security of tenure”. It wants a judicial review of Mr Ramatlhodi’s decision to set aside a prospecting right on Avontuur and of his failure to award Aquila a mining right to the Gravenhage deposit.

 

Aquila wants the court to grant it the mining right over the Gravenhage deposit, failing which it would request the court to compel Mr Ramatlhodi to revisit his decision, set aside the right granted to PAMDC and grant Aquila a mining right based on the facts aired in court.

 

Aquila will argue that Mr Ramatlhodi’s decision relied on incorrect facts and interpretations of the law.

 

This is the third major case brought against the department this year.

 

An application on the interpretation of the empowerment ownership clause in the Mining Charter has been lodged and another wants the mining charters to be set aside. The department granted PAMDC a prospecting right over the deposit after awarding Aquila a right over the Avontuur property in October 2006, Aquila said. “The alleged overlapping prospecting right appears, from the documentation, to have been executed on November 19 2011, which is over five years after a prospecting right over parts of the same areas was granted to Aquila,” it said.

 

“The alleged grant was also almost one year after Aquila’s mining right application was accepted by the department,” it said.

 

Aquila said three years after lodging its mining application and receiving no decision from Mr Ramatlhodi, it received documents from PAMDC’s lawyers saying their client was the holder of an overlapping prospecting right. SA’s PAMDC stake is held in the state’s African Exploration Mining and Finance Corporation.

 

In July this year, Mr Ramatlhodi notified Aquila its prospecting right had been rescinded, its mining right application had been rejected and a prospecting right over the contested area belonged to PAMDC.

 

Aquila has spent R150m on exploration and defining a 112-million tonne manganese resource. The hope in the recent talks was that Aquila would be given sole access to the Gravenhage deposit at which it had conducted a feasibility study into extracting a mineable reserve of 20-million tonnes to deliver 1.2-million tonnes annually for the export market. The rest of Avontuur could go to PAMDC.

 

PAMDC had lodged its own appeal, saying it had based its prospecting right application on old-order rights held by Ziza, the predecessor to PAMDC.