JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Platinum mining and refining company Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) had recommenced the process to dispose of its Union mine and an offer had been received for its interest in the Pandora Platinum joint venture.

“We didn’t get to a landing on a sale with the partners we were talking to,” Amplats CEO Chris Griffith said at Wednesday’s analyst and media conference attended by Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online.

He said Amplats had restarted some discussions with further parties on Union, where all of the subsequent disposal processes “should be able to run much quicker”.

The offer received for its interest in Pandora was under discussion with co-owner Lonmin Platinum and the Department of Mineral Resources.

Much work had been done on the correct technical mine plan for Bokoni, which had put Amplats and its empowerment partner Atlatsa Resources in a position to proceed with disposal discussions.

“All of the assets of our noncore platinum portfolio have processes under way,” Griffith added.

Speaking at question time after the announcement of the sale of Amplats’ Rustenburg Operations to Sibanye Gold for R4.5-billion, he said Union mine did form part of the package that was available for sale to Sibanye.

Sibanye CEO Neal Froneman said Sibanye had decided to include Union because it “wanted to avoid choking on its first bite” into platinum mining.

The Rustenburg Operations were of sufficient magnitude on their own and would make Sibanye the fifth-largest platinum producer at 800 000 oz/y and a long reserve horizon.

Griffith said Amplats had remained consistent in not pulling the plug on any of its assets and would be providing a fourth refinancing of Atlatsa, before proceeding with the sale of Amplats’ 49% interest in the underlying Bokoni.

“Even though we are planning to dispose of these assets, we’ve still gone through the very hard job of restructuring, which was not an easy process,” said Griffith, who added that the company would continue to work very closely with Atlatsa, the managing partner at Bokoni, and do the right thing for the assets “until the very last day that we are associated with them”.

“Now that we’ve done the technical work upfront, we’ve got a really good view of what we think the Bokoni assets can do and what both parties think we should be doing for those assets going forward.

“With that in place, it makes it very easy for us to talk to any potential investor into that asset, including taking over our share,” Griffith said.