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PanTerra pursues $25m damages claim against Dominican govt

24th May 2018

By: Esmarie Iannucci

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor: Australasia

     

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PERTH (miningweekly.com) – ASX-listed PanTerra Gold on Thursday told shareholders that it would pursue up to $25-million in damages from the Dominican government, over allegations that the government failed to meet its contractual obligations at the Las Lagunas tailings dam project.

The Las Lagunas project involves the reclamation of existing tailings by dredging, ultrafine grinding, concentration of gold bearing sulphides through flotation followed by sulphide oxidation using the Albion process, prior to extraction of gold and silver utilising standard carbon-in-leach cyanidation.

The Dominican government was liable to provide a suitable dam site for the storage of reprocessed tailings from the Las Lagunas project, PanTerra said. However, as a result of its failure to do so, the company, through its subsidiary EnviroGold, was forced to replace the reprocessed tailings behind the Las Lagunas dam from where they had been dredged prior to processing.

This involved dredging the voids in the original deposit, which were later refilled behind rock bund walls, which had to be constructed in order to avoid contamination of gold-bearing sulphide material with the processed oxide slurry being stored.

PanTerra noted that besides the costs of the rock walls and the material double-handling, the dredging method did not permit blending of the highly variable in-situ tailings before processing, which resulted in reduced performances of the flotation and Albion oxidation circuits of the processing plants, leading to reduced gold recoveries.

The government has not reacted to communication from EnviroGold, prompting the company to instruct its legal council to submit a formal notification of a dispute to the Minister for Energy and Mines.

If this dispute was not settled through negotiations, it will proceed to arbitration in Washington DC.

Edited by Mariaan Webb
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor Online

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