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Canadian company Roman Copper Corp won Monday’s bid for Romania’s largest copper mine, beating out three competitors including Australian miner OZ Minerals.
Bidding for the Cupru Min Abrud mine started at 57 million euros and closed at 200 million euros, according to Romanian Business Insider.
The Romanian Economy Ministry received four bids for the mine, which has estimated reserves of 900,000 tonnes of copper, or around 60% of Romania’s copper reserves. Bidders included OZ Minerals Ltd., Dutch Dundee Holding, Roman Copper Corp., and Bulgarian company Ellatzite Med Ad.
Unlisted Roman Copper is owned by Toronto-based investment banker Bayfront Capital Partners.
Sydney Morning Herald reports that OZ Minerals, which is sitting on an acquisition warchest of nearly a billion dollars, could be looking at bigger fish to fry than Cupru Min Abrud, which produces just 10% as much copper as its flagship Prominent Hill mine and with lower grades than its recently purchased Carrapateena prospect. Quoting EL & C Baillieu analyst Adrian Prendergast:
‘We believe the market is expecting OZ to make a large and expensive acquisition, whereas we believe a better approach that the company may be following is to pursue multiple acquisitions of varying sizes to offset the eventual depletion of Prominent Hill,” he said.
2 Comments
Mariamagdalena
Romania Press discovered that Roman Copper does not even have the money for the project.
We can see that this project is an extension of Rosia Montana Gold project designed and implemented by the same web of companies who try to takeover the Romanian national resources in a Romanian corrupted “privatisation” system. Romania press reports that Roman Copper does not even have 200 m Euro the money they were supposed to pay for 2 billion Euro Romanian national treasure.
Canadian and US companies involvement in “projects” of Rosia Montana Gold and Cupru Min should be immediately investigated by Canadian and US authorities.
Dan Oancea
I worked at several exploration projects in the region this one included. This copper mine is a few kms away from Gabriel Resources controversial Rosia Montana gold mining project. But those few kms make a whole lot of difference as nobody opposes THIS mine! Actually just came back from Romania – met former colleagues/geologists and I could tell that they’re not fond anymore of Canadians mining in their backyard because of the way they perceive the Rosia Montana project and because of a cyanide pollution accident that happened a while ago. Hope to see them changing their mind after modern mining would restart at this copper mine.