The Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy has awarded coal producer Seriti Resources CEO Mike Teke with a Brigadier Stokes Memorial Award for his contribution to the mining industry and his leadership role in society. The platinum medal presented to Teke last week by Seriti’s outgoing president Professor Sehliselo Ndlovu is considered the highest honour to be bestowed by the mining and metallurgical sector.
JSE- and LSE-listed Tharisa is continuing discussions with the Leto Settlement Trust regarding the optimisation of certain aspects of the transaction structure for Tharisa’s 90% shareholding in the Zimbabwe-based Salene chrome project. Tharisa envisages a successful outcome to the discussions, the company said on Tuesday, and believes the transaction will result in the economic benefits to Tharisa.
LSE-listed Polymetal International has declared an interim dividend of $0.17 a share for the first half of the year, higher than the $0.14 a share for the first half of 2017, the company reported on Tuesday. The dividend distribution, to be paid on September 28, represents 50% of the group’s underlying net income for the half-year period of about $77-million.
TSX-V-listed Osisko Metals has appointed geologist Robert Wares, currently the chairperson of the board, as executive chairperson. Wares has more than 35 years’ experience in mineral exploration and development, and was one of the three original founders of Osisko Exploration/Osisko Mining.
The US risks losing out from its curbs on trade as rival nations including China will seek to do more business with each other, BHP Billiton CEO Andrew Mackenzie warned as the head of the world’s largest miner stepped up his criticism of rising protectionism. “There’s a lot of countries in the world that want to trade more with each other, now that it looks like the US.wants to trade less with them,” Mackenzie said in a Bloomberg Television interview, citing discussions with global trade Ministers.
Another 200 employees of the Minera San Rafael operation, in Guatemala, have lost their jobs, the Reno, Nevada-owner of the Escobal mine, Tahoe Resources, reported on Monday. The company, which is in a long-running dispute with the Latin American nation and has not been able to produce silver from the Escobal mine since operations were shuttered in July 2017, said that it had now dismissed about 70% of the total workforce of Minera San Rafael.
Global miner BHP Billiton said it was assessing the impact of an ongoing outage at its Olympic dam copper smelter in South Australia, as it released its annual results on Tuesday. The outage followed the failure of several boiler tubes at the acid plant, it said without offering an expected timeline for operations to resume.
Diversified miner Rio Tinto has opened the fourth diamond pipe at its Diavik diamond mine, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The A21 openpit pipe will provide an important source of incremental supply over the next four years to sustain production levels at the mine, Rio said on Tuesday.
Diversified miner BHP has reported a 33% increase in underlying attributable profit for the financial year ended June, as well as a 10% increasing in operating cash flows. Underlying attributable profit, which excludes one-time gains and losses, was reported at $8.9-billion for the 2018 financial year, compared with the $6.7-billion in 2017, while operating cash flows increased from $16.8-billion to $18.4-billion.
