Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Tenke Mining news from African Mining Congress

Mention where these news were posted:
As I wrote before Chinese are very active in the region, they are securing natural resources and other assets for worthless dollars which they have plenty (reserves are around 1 trillion USD). They are building railroads and roads to secure supply lines to feed their Dragon. Tenke mining will be bought out in the end and it is important that all Argentina and Chile properties will be spined off before that otherwise there will be no value for them in the purchase price. Dividend in kind like Capstone Mining did when they spined off Silverstone Resources comes to mind.
Apart from Chinese following the story about 17 investors now attending the Congress and will be visiting Tenke Fungurume site today. Feasibility study must be finished already and should be released in next couple of weeks.
"¡¡¡¡PHELPS Dodge Corp and Tenke Mining Corp expect to secure financing for their Tenke Fungurume project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by September, taking them a step closer to building the continent's biggest copper mine.¡¡¡¡2006Öйú½ðÈÚÄêÈÈËÎï»î¶¯ÆÀÑ¡
The two companies will borrow a "significant" portion of the US$650 million needed to build the 400,000-metric-ton-a-year mine, Tenke Chief Executive Officer Paul Conibear said in an interview in Zambia. Most of the money will be borrowed from export credit agencies and "multilateral" lenders, he said. Multilateral lenders include International Finance Corp, Bloomberg News said.
"We're looking at getting the debt in place in the third quarter," Conibear said at the African Mining Congress in Victoria Falls, Zambia. "There are very few commercial banks at the table."
Record copper prices and the peaceful elections last year have attracted miners back into the country, five years after the end of a civil war that left four million dead. The central African country, as big as western Europe, has about 10 percent of the world's copper reserves.
Phelps, based in Phoenix, and Tenke, based in Vancouver, own a combined 83 percent of the project. They favor multilateral lenders because of longer repayment periods, lower interest rates and their "political clout," Conibear said. N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd. is advising them on financing.
Gecamines, the Congo's state-owned copper producer, owns the balance of the project and doesn't have to fund any of its development cost."

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