Zimplats settles five-year dispute

Impala Platinum (Implats) subsidiary Zimplats has finalised a deal with the Zimbabwean government around a five-year-old demand that the company give up half of its landholding in the world’s second-largest known platinum deposit.

The Zimbabwean government issued a gazette in March 2013 notifying Zimplats, which is listed in Australia, that then president Robert Mugabe intended seizing 27,948ha of land held by the company on the Great Dyke, the largest source of platinum outside SA.

Under the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimplats has reached a conclusion to the matter, ceding 23,903ha back to the state and dividing Zimplats’s land holding into two disconnected portions.

Implats, which owns 87% of Zimplats, said the agreement was “in support of the government’s efforts to enable participation by other investors in the platinum mining industry in Zimbabwe”.

EMPOWERMENT

Zimplats returned one-third of its land holding to the government in 2006 in exchange for cash it has yet to receive and empowerment credits.

Before this week’s agreement, Zimplats held about twothirds of the 100km-long Hartley Complex on the Great Dyke, which contains about 80% of Zimbabwe’s platinum group metals.

The 27,948ha the government set its sights on contained about 54-million ounces of platinum resources.

Implats spokesman Johan Theron declined to say how many resource ounces Zimplats retained in the transaction, which now gave the company mining rights over the life of operations on the remaining 24,632ha it retained.

These mining leases replace the special mining lease held by Zimplats and “secure the operating subsidiary’s mining tenure”, he said.