Vanuatu dimisses reported nickel deal in Santo

Transcript

The Vanuatu government has poured cold water on reports of a deal between a New Caledonian and a Chinese company to build a one-billion US dollar nickel plant in Vanuatu.

A joint venture was signed last week between New Caledonia's MKM company and China's Jin Pei.

Their reported plan was to mine New Caledonia's low quality ore reserves and ship them to Santo in northern Vanuatu to a smelter yet to be built.

The problem is, the Vanuatu government says it knows nothing about it.

Johnny Blades has more:

The need to build a new plant to process low quality ore from New Caledonia's abundant nickel reserves meant that the MKM company looked offshore. The head of MKM, Wilfried Mai, told New Caledonian television that he advised the Chinese investors to build the plant in neighbouring Vanuatu.

WILFRIED MAI: The best is to do this in Vanuatu. Why Vanuatu? It's a country in Melanesia, there is no tax, labour is not expensive and it's not far away from our country - all the advantages.

However, Vanuatu's Minister of Lands and Natural Resources Ralph Regenvanu has dismissed this report:

RALPH REGENVANU: I'm the Minister of Mines and the first I heard of this was the report on Radio New Zealand, then I saw a report on New Caledonia Premier, and the government knows nothing about it. It's not happening because the government knows nothing about it. So I don't know what they're signing an agreement to do but it's nothing to do with the Vanuatu government, and therefore it's not going to happen.

JOHNNY BLADES: Have there been any talks at all though from members of your government about this, maybe just preliminary talks with the Chinese company?

RR: The former Minister of Lands and Mines, the honourable Stephen Kalsakau, had been talking with custom owners on Santo about extracting limestone which would be shipped to New Caledonia to assist in treating the tailings from the Goro nickel mine. So that was about a large scale quarry operation to take limestone from the east coast of Santo, ship it down to New Caledonia and then it would be used to neutralise the tailings and the sludge that was coming out of the mines. Those dicsussions happened but never progressed further because Goro nickel ended up buying limestone from the Philippines. But in terms of these reports of setting up a nickel plant in Santo, no discussions have been entered into of any sort about that.

JB: Maybe a landowner group may have made representations? It does seem unusual.

RR: Yes well, when the reports came out I consulted the Commissioner of Mines, who is the person in charge of all mining, quarrying, prospecting activity in Vanuatu, and he knows nothing about it. I was maybe suspecting that it was something happening at the department level or something but no, nothing's happened there either so basically no one knows anything about it... maybe a landowner group has made a representation about it, I'm not sure.

JB: For the record anyway, is it the sort of thing Vanuatu might be interested in? It has environmental impacts probably but it could provide jobs if it went ahead.

RR: No, we're not interested in it. The area they're talking about is a premier tourist destination in Vanuatu. This is where Champagne Beach is and some of the best, sandy beaches in Vanuatu. So we're not interested in putting a mine there.