Guinea Government: Rio Tinto iron ore project threat to “civil peace”

July 24, 2009

Rio Tinto is having another bad week.   Well-respected industry consultant, Jack Parker, has reiterated his concern that Rio Tinto’s Eagle nickel project application contains a plethora of incompetent and potentially fraudulent information and one of the company’s iron ore executives and three staff remain in Chinese custody over bribery and espionage charges.  If this weren’t enough to cause investors to question the company’s decision making abilities, Rio Tinto has found itself in another fracas.  This time, the Government of Guinea has accused the company of threatening the country’s economic autonomy and “civil peace.”

guinea map

Map courtesy WikiMedia Commons

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Rio Tinto: Investing in Instability

March 4, 2007

by Gabriel Caplett

Over the past decade, China’s rapidly expanding economy has caused a dramatic jump in metal prices, specifically copper. Although some analysts predicted a 30% decline in copper prices for 2007[1], a BHP-Billiton (BHP) executive, Diego Hernandez, noted recently that “the market is firm,” citing that demand from China will continue to support record prices: “…last year the Chinese bought less because they used a lot of inventory and have now started to go back to the market.”[2]

In 2003, then-Rio Tinto chairman Robert Wilson said “China’s growth, with its heavy emphasis on infrastructure development, has become a major influence in the market for many of our products….China’s consumption of metal has been growing by more than 10 per cent annually and rapid growth seems likely to continue.”[3] Read the rest of this entry »

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