ASX-listed Antilles Gold says arbitration proceedings for the settlement of contractual disputes with the Dominican Republic Government are moving ahead with the company having lodged a formal statement of claim and witness statements to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Bowral, NSW-based Antilles has made the claim for approximately US$20 million over the completed Las Lagunas gold tailings project. Most of the claim total relates to what the company says was the Government’s failure to meet its contractual obligation to provide a site in 2005-06 for the construction of a new dam to store reprocessed refractory tailings.
As a result, Antilles Gold says its subsidiary was forced to store reprocessed tailings in the Las Lagunas dam from where they had been mined and incurred additional costs from depositing the reprocessed tailings behind substantial rock retaining walls that had to be built within the dam.
According to the company, the new Dominican Republic Government, which was elected in July last year, may be interested in negotiating a settlement of the claim as an alternative to the arbitration process.
Antilles says the Government has also encouraged Antilles to consider developing a new, second-generation Albion-CIL treatment plant at Las Lagunas – in partnership with the Government-owned Rosario Dominicana outfit – to process imported refractory concentrate.
Rosario Dominicana owns the Las Lagunas dam, which has the capacity to store tailings from a 100,000 tonnes per annum processing plant for over 20 years.
The Las Lagunas gold tailings retreatment project in the Dominican Republic involved the recovery of approximately 5 million tonnes of stored refractory tailings from the Pueblo Viejo gold mine via dredging, production of a float concentrate, ultrafine grinding, oxidation, and production of dore through CIL and elution circuits.
The first Las Lagunas Albion-CIL gold processing plant incarnation operated between July 2012 and December 2019.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Matt Birney
