Tag Archives: Vale

Old Habits Die Hard: Rio Tinto allegedly bribed government officials in Guinea

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Regular readers may recall that in Simandou Guinea has one of the richest iron ore deposits in the world; and that it is a development project that I have been following for a while.

You may also recall the infamous story of how Israeli tycoon Benny Steinmetz paid nothing for exploration rights in a half of Simandou, proceeded to invest about $160m in developing the mine, only to flip it a couple of years later for $2.5b. The Brazilian mining giant Vale was the unfortunate victim of Steinmetz’s scheme.

According to The Intercept:

An investigation by the current government of Guinea found that a shell company controlled by BSGR paid at least $2.4 million to Mamadie Touré, a wife of the former dictator [Lansana Conte], in return for her help in acquiring the rights to the mine for BSGR. Earlier this year the government annulled BSGR’s stake in the mine, saying the firm had obtained it through corruption.

Others on the payroll included then Minister for Mines, Mahmoud Thiam, who preferred to spend his earnings on a Lamborghini, an apartment in Manhattan (%1.5m), and an estate in Dutchess County ($3.75m). All paid for in cash. After the death of President Lansana Conte and the election of Alpha Conde, the government of Guinea successfully repossessed the mine from Vale and vowed to clean up the mining sector.

But old habits die hard.

It now emerges that President Alpha Conde, who successfully managed to get the illegally acquired half of Simandou, was himself allegedly paid about $10.5m in bribes to secure Rio Tinto’s rights to the other half.  May be I am too naive, but are these side payments enough to give away billions of dollars worth of value? It is sad enough that Conde may have taken the bribe. But it is doubly disappointing that his price was so low.

Why don’t people like Conde and Thiam think of setting up their own mining companies, or contractors to the global giants?

How does one begin the process of inculcating a sense of an encompassing interest in an otherwise rapacious elite?

Here is the story from the FT:

Rio Tinto’s lawyers uncovered more than a year ago internal emails about a questionable $10.5m payment to a consultant, but the mining company did not alert law enforcement authorities and investors about the matter until last week. The Anglo-Australian group said on November 9 that it had notified authorities after discovering emails from 2011 that referred to the payment to the consultant, who helped head off a threat to Rio’s claim to the giant Simandou iron ore project in Guinea.

In the emails, seen by the Financial Times, Alan Davies, the executive in charge of Simandou, discusses with Tom Albanese, then chief executive, and Sam Walsh, then head of iron ore, paying a $10.5m fee to François Polge de Combret, a former top French banker and classmate of Guinea’s president. Following an internal inquiry begun in August, Rio said last week that it had referred the matter to law enforcement authorities in the UK, the US and Australia. The company now faces years of scrutiny and the risk of large fines if it is found to have broken anti-corruption laws.

In another section:

The dispute over Simandou dates back to 2008, when the Guinean dictator of the day stripped Rio of the rights to the northern half of the project and handed them to BSG Resources, the mining arm of Israeli diamond tycoon Beny Steinmetz’s family conglomerate. BSGR went on to agree a $2.5bn deal to bring in Vale of Brazil as its partner.

In 2011, Rio secured its claim to the remaining half of Simandou with a $700m payment to the then new government of President Alpha Condé — a deal which, the emails indicate, Mr de Combret helped to facilitate. The ex-Lazard banker declined to comment.

Resource Dependence in Africa (with some thoughts on Mozambique)

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Source: The World Bank

Source: The World Bank. Click on image to enlarge  

This map shows resource rents as a share of GDP for the period 2009-2013. Note that the colouring on the map is about to change, with the Indian Ocean east coast getting some of the hydrocarbon action that has hitherto been a preserve of the Atlantic coast and a couple of landlocked states like Chad, Sudan and South Sudan (The biggest change in West Africa will most likely be in Guinea once the mining of its high grade iron ore in the Simandou Mountains gets going. A few contractual and logistical hurdles still stand in the way of the mega mining project).

The eastern African states of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique are about to get a shade or more redder. Kenya and Uganda will start producing oil between 2016-17. Tanzania and Mozambique have massive amounts of natural gas, with Mozambique having recently climbed to top four in the world with a capacity to meet total global demand for more than two years.

As you may have guessed Mozambique is by far the country to watch out for as far as the ongoing eastern African resource bonanza is concerned. The country will continue to see a rapid rise in coal production, ultimately producing an estimated 42 million tons in 2017. Mozambique’s Gold production is also expected to more than triple by 2017 relative to its 2011 level. Estimates suggest that based on the full capacity exploitation of coal and gas alone the Mozambican economy could rise to become SSA’s third or fourth largest (after Nigeria, South Africa and (or ahead of) Angola). Going by the 2012 GDP figures from the Bank, that would be a change from US$14 billion to about $114 billion.

Have you enrolled in Portuguese classes yet?

As Mozambique gets wealthier in the next five years at a vertiginous pace, it will be interesting to see if it will go the Angola way. Both are former Portuguese colonies that had drawn out civil wars. Both tried to have democratic elections but then the ruling parties managed to completely vanquish the opposition. And both continue to be ruled by overwhelmingly dominant parties that appear to have consolidated power.

My hunch is that Mozambique is different, as FRELIMO is less of a one man show than is the MPLA. Indeed FRELIMO just selected a successor to Guebuza, the Defense Minister Filipe Nyusi (Nyusi’s background in engineering and the railway sector should prove useful for the development of the country’s coal industry).

The Tanzanian model of dominant/hegemonic party with term limits appears to have spread south. And that is a good thing. The other African country that appears to be embracing this model is Ethiopia (I think I can now say that the Zenawi succession was smooth and that Desalegn, also an engineer, is credibly term limtied).

Kampala, Kigali and Yaounde should borrow a leaf from these guys (that is, as a second best strategy given that their respective leaders do not seem to be into the idea of competitive politics).

For more on the politics and management of natural resources in Africa see here, here and here.

Are some Guinean government officials idiots, criminals or both?

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This was an extraordinary windfall: B.S.G.R. had paid nothing up front, as is customary with exploration licenses, and at that point had invested only a hundred and sixty million dollars. In less than five years, B.S.G.R.’s investment in Simandou had become a five-billion-dollar asset. At that time, the annual budget of the government of Guinea amounted to just $1.2 billion. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecom billionaire, captured the reaction of many observers when he asked, at a forum in Dakar, “Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?”

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Source: WSJ Online

That is Patrick Keefe in a long but fantastic piece in the New Yorker detailing the web of corruption that characterizes resource sector deals on the Continent. It is an account of mining executives so daring that they even sign contracts on kickback.

The villains the piece are not just the mining executives but also government officials who are too lazy to even do the required due diligence to ensure that, at the very minimum, they get a “fair value” in kickbacks from the companies to which they readily mortgage their countries.

The answer to Mo Ibrahim’s question above lies in the quote below:

During our meeting in the whitewashed building, I asked Touré how it made him feel to learn of such allegations about former colleagues. He paused. “The feeling of shame,” he said at last. “Because, finally, what they have got personally—let’s say ten million U.S. dollars, twelve million U.S. dollars—what does that amount to? Compared with the lives of the whole country?” The lights in the room suddenly shut off, and the air-conditioner powered down. He didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t think that it is tolerable or acceptable from the investors,” he continued. “But I’m more shocked by the attitude and the behavior of the national decision-makers” [Note: the new president of Guinea has been waging a war against shady deals from past administrations]

As I have complained before, something needs to be done about the way African states deal with multinationals in the resources sector (beginning with getting the skill set of government workers in the responsible ministries to match those of the oil company reps).

Also, every time I read such stories I can’t help but think, where are the African Beny Steinmetz’s? When will the African political class transition from being petty brokers to actual investors in their own resources?

Why are some African governments so bad at managing their countries’ resources?

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UPDATE: According to Reuters,  Israeli billionaire businessman Dan Gertler sold one of his Congo-based oil companies to the government last year for $150 million – 300 times the amount paid for the oil rights – in a deal criticised by transparency campaigners.

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Resource mismanagement in Africa is not just a story of rampant corruption and the complete lack of political will for reform. It is also a story of governments that remain completely out-staffed by multinationals with far superior technical capacities. Improving resource management on the continent will therefore have to be as much about government technical capacity development as it will be about political reform.

Vale, for example, employs nearly 200,000 people around the world and has annual profits equivalent to nearly four times Mozambique’s state budget. It can recruit, train, and compensate employees to represent its interests on a scale far beyond what the government can do. Without Vale’s capacity for number crunching, Mozambique’s regulators lean on the companies they oversee for all manner of important data.

In 2011, the Mozambican government published an independent study of the country’s mining, oil, and gas industries. Conducted by a Ghanaian consulting company, Boas and Associates, the report was part of Mozambique’s application to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a World Bank-funded program designed to encourage an honest accounting of mining revenue and payments by participating countries and corporations alike. Mozambique’s candidacy was ultimately denied on the basis of its failure to publish what it earned from the companies involved, [but the report also noted a lack of qualified personnel in the agencies governing almost every aspect of the extraction of Mozambique’s natural resources]: licenses, prospecting, mining and drilling, sales, export.

According to the report, the [Mozambican government has no way of verifying the quality and quantity of minerals in the concessions it leases to private companies, and it depends on those companies for data on what is ultimately mined and exported]. Worse, the government has no system for monitoring global commodity prices or of tracking companies’ investment costs, which means it cannot independently verify a company’s profits.

Lesson? It’s not all corruption. It is also about the incentive structure that has resulted from government’s reliance on the word of profit-maximizing mining companies.

Improving government capacity to regulate resource sector operations is a key pillar of accountability and transparency that is currently missing from the discussion on how to manage Africa’s resources. It is easier to blame it all on thieving politicians and mining executives.

Not all governments might find it useful to improve their technical capacity (it is easier for them to steal if the valuation of state assets remain uncertain) but I bet many African states, especially those with moderately democratic regimes, can be persuaded to boost their technical capacity, if not for anything then just to improve their bargaining position vis-a-vis mining companies. At a minimum, this would mean more money for their pockets, and perhaps also more money for roads, schools and hospitals.